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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Because that would be an incredible violation of privacy and is probably illegal?

I’m not even sure China does that.

I found this site about Singapore yesterday. This kind of detail would never fly in the US. But they do seem to have used it effectively to track the spread of the disease:

https://co.vid19.sg/cases

Holy crap! That's an impressive set of data.

The first thing that came to my mind is HIPAA (I know it's US only). There are more than enough details for each patient to figure out who they are. They list employer, when they traveled, family members, etc.

That level of detail is definitely enough to unmask an individual but if you wanted to protect the infected person's privacy (while massively violating others' in order to join the data sets), it seems like it would be possible to notify an individual that they were exposed, and not leak the infected person's personal details.

Both Singapore and South Korea publicly report such data. Names are anonymized, but it isn't that hard to dox them.

I personally think it is bad that HIPAA doesn't have epidemic exemptions. Over you have widespread testing, having this info public allows:

* Exposed individuals to submit to testing, learning more about who may be exposed = more data and find more exposure

* Learn valuable patterns about disease transfer. E.g. Both Singapore and South Korea clusters suggest children aren't playing a significant role in transfer, but aren't enough data to know for sure. With more data, perhaps we would know they aren't and could avoid enormously expensive school closings.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the end games of lockdown in Western societies are with a disease that can spread asymptomatically. You need these kind of X area was infected at y time announcements to get high enough testing coverage of potentialy infected people.

Oh they’re doing that. You can use AliPay, an omnipresent payments app to get a QR code based on your movements over the past days as tracked by your mobile. If it’s green you’re safe, yellow or red I think you need to be quarantined or at least monitored.

Of fucking course, China does that. Watch the videos on how they are dealing with it. There are several on YouTube. When you get in and out of a subway or a building or whatever you have to scan a QR code with WeChat. Otherwise, you're not allowed to proceed.

They also take your temperature in all these places and if your temp is higher than normal they send you to a fever clinic, where they determine if you have the virus. If you do, you're isolated and your movement data gets flagged to track other potentially infected individuals.

Can you link me one?

Location/association tracking and risk profiling is being done in China with Alipay Health Code[0].

Flash green at the checkpoint and you're allowed through. If your app shows yellow or red -> checks and quarantine.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/07/how-gl...

Korea has a map of all of your travels for the public to see.

Could you expand on that?

For those tested positive they trace/record your travels and put it online so everyone can see if they may have been in the area.

Apparently Israel, Iran, and China are all using people’ cell phones to track infected people.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman...

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