U.S. govt, tech industry discuss using location data to combat coronavirus
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is the sort of problem that could be solved in a better world; collecting location data to find interactions between people would allow you to get them tested faster and prevent a disease from spreading. But it simply can't be done in this country primarily because everyone has the entirely reasonable fear that the feds want this power for nefarious reasons and will never give it up - and they're probably right.
If we had a society where privacy was an absolute right, and civic trust in our community organizations and institutions was built up over time, during a crisis like this one we could come together and find agreement on a way of providing this data to a responsible institution that would use it only for the purpose of saving lives and then delete it when the crisis was over. And they'd lose access to future data at that point too. Anyone who still didn't trust the communal institutions could opt out, but the point of building up this trust is that it makes people want to work together and feel safe doing so.
We're so far from that in this country that we're not only paranoid about privacy issues, it seems altogether most likely that our secret agencies are actively planning to exploit this crisis to be able to spy on us in the future.
What I guess I'm asking is ... what if the organizations we built looked more like the WHO, and less like the CIA?
Then an enterprising startup can deliver marked-up, preassembled devices, then people might have privacy again.
Things like it wouldn't read my sim (bug 666), the stylus was almost required, but there was no place to put it, audio issues, sleep/wake issues, poor battery indication and tricky to charge from a flat battery.
Sure, the screen was kind of small, but the resolution was high, so you could claim hidpi before Apple invented it?
I say like the idea of as opposed to use as currently Fairphone is out of my budget and I can't find a phone in my budget range that's supported by Lineage/MicroG so I just have somewhat reliable <£100 phone with as much de-googling as I can while still having normal android.. (Not much)
Edit: the bonus of phones in this price range is like Fairphones they almost always make it easy to quickly remove the battery so you're certain nothing's running.
This is probably pure fantasy, but if there was any way this scenario would be possible, I think it would go a long way to assuaging people's concerns. As it is, we know data can be copied and distributed without permission. That's kind of been the underlying problem of spies throughout the history of the world.
I think this concept is where Stephenson was going with Snow Crash, but his scenario for this seemed like fantasy as well to me.
The simple example would be "I'd like to send indigochill a gift", which would send a request to your API (with some notification for you to approve or deny receiving said package) and return an id that could be written or printed on an envelope. That id is unique and the mail service would scan the id and the package would be routed. And the mail carrier would scan the id and get an actual address (or a blip on their map of the block or something). Nobody along the way has learned your address or name or anything - nor do they know my address, which is just another unique id.
There are some very interesting implications in that data can become stale so quickly. If you approved of receiving the package but were out of town for the week, the package could be routed directly to you without any interaction whatsoever. Nobody along the way would know the difference between your home or your hotel room.
The same could easily be done for lots of personal data. Phone numbers, email addresses, etc. All your shopping history could be stored on your own private data store and the local grocery stores would send out a mailer "Address this mailer to all people in the neighborhood who have purchased discounted burgers in the past month". The store doesn't know who is getting the flyer, but the people who would be likely to use a coupon for buying burgers would get a notification and likely go buy some burgers on sale - or reject the notification and not be bothered - to the savings of the store and the recipient.
Social Media could still exist with this sort of thing but the services would be querying engines rather than the creepy data warehouses that they've become.
This of course gets significantly harder with the queries this article is about, but the idea is the same. Instead of "give me everyone's location for the past month", the request would be "give me the anonymized ids of people who have been to x locations for x amount of time within x amount of space between one another". The response would provide data that could be used for the purpose in question, but the underlying data remains private.
I've been pondering this idea on random occasion for about 15 years, but I don't care enough about it to make it my life's work. But I sure would like to live in a world with that level of data ownership and privacy.
In the meantime, sounds like most likely outcome is the government hits CTRL C, CTRL V on Facebook/google’s user database and starts a China/Tencent style SQL dB on every American.
Or even more likely, this already exists and now the government can start using it more openly.
Of course none of this stops the person with temporary access from making a copy to save forever. I doubt that problem has a technical solution but would love to be proved wrong.
What if information can't be revoked on systems outside your control? That's the reality, however many secret handshakes you do, blockchain, etc, eventually some person or process knows something and can do something with it (e.g. copy it).
You could pull a gmail and say, there is no human in the loop, it's just a process of personal data ingestion and ads come out the other end. That might be more comforting if it was open source, but even open systems have things can be hidden in obscure technical details.
The truth is, we are all human, including our leaders. Your average human is weak and susceptible to trading a vast privilege like having control of everyone's whereabouts for favors (e.g. money, position, control, sex, etc...).
I'm a sucker for an open source process (e.g. robot) that would look at the data and tell us who needs to be quarantined, but again, you still have human technical people, with all their failings, controlling the system (e.g. source code). How much do you trust the open source process is a matter open for debate.
Look at the EU. There is no dearth of cockups there, even though their instinct at everything is non-authoritarian.
We've seen that wit smaller political parties as well. When membership suddenly become a viable path to power things change in the structure and people.
This is the key. The power makes joining their ranks appealing to those that would abuse the power.
You can mitigate this to some extent by having one or a couple people who are personally responsible for the whole organization (royal families in monarchies, the owners of privately owned companies, etc) but then your organixation is not resilient to bad leadership.
it is not paranoia but an acknowledgement of the times we live in.
>> our secret agencies are actively planning to exploit this crisis to be able to spy on us in the future.
this is based on their past history. Like you said, it is entirely due to utter lack of trust.
But that aside, I don't think the measure would be worthwhile even now. Instead focus should be to fortify local health services and provide support where needed.
A damaged believe that fundamental rights are compromised has of course negative repercussions on the willingness to cooperate with authorities of any kind.
Trust cannot be enforced and authority is always limited. I wouldn't call it paranoia, because in that case the respective fears aren't confirmed that often by people now in solitary confinement because some hot shots thought they were in control and did was was allegedly necessary.
The smallest step up from that is running an open-source algorithm on Google's servers, for corona detection.
From that situation, maybe we could figure out a way that people would trust, enough ?
The UK managed to get rid of ID cards in 1948 on pretty much this basis. The problem is, that war ended, but the one started on 9/11/2001 hasn't. For temporary authority we need both clearly defined end conditions, a belief that they will be reached, and faith in the authorities to work in good faith towards the ending of that crisis.
We do not really need to find agreement, it would suffice if mobile operators implement opt-in that could be easily enabled in web portals. Then society can just advertise this opt-in.
NO. Global data about who interacts with who and where should NOT be available to anyone. Especially NOT to HEALTHCARE orgs, I couldn't imagine less trustworthy and skewed-incentives institutions! At least you can trust that a country's secret service like your NSA would keep most of that data safe (as in "safe even the eyes of from judges & prosecutors unless you have a national security issue" etc.). Like in I'd rather have +10k deaths from preventable contagious diseases per year and take the chance of being amongst them then having this on a wide scale.
> civic trust in our community organizations and institutions was built up over time
You have no reason to trust anyone and anything. Stop doing so.
> a responsible institution
There's no such thing. Any institution should be considered thoroughly corrupted in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
> our secret agencies are actively planning to exploit this
It's their job to do so! If you want to provide solid security in globally connected world the "protectors" need to be a bit above the law - it's OK as long as what they collect stays in their archives and you prevent them from holding political or financial power.
The point is to build societies that can function TRUSTLESSLY and where everything is SECRET BY DEFAULT unless explicitly shared.
That's the only way to have an open society! Sure, in small isolated pockets you can have your "trust" in institutions and stuff.
Otherwise it's a choice between:
(1) accept framework of trustlessness + secrecy-by-default + broad exceptions for security agencies mostly as long as they DON'T share data with anyone (no, not even to "save lives", unless you're taking more than thousands...)
(2) drop the global interconnectedness, drop most free travel and work (I don't mean relocation - you'd also need to drop the kind of temporary travel that can't be easily monitored!), move to a more localist society - here you can have trust in the institutions of your own "pocket" that you voted for yourself.
Unfortunately it seems that the pendulum will now swing towards (2) as you seem to say you prefer - ...too bad, I'm sure we could've made the global-village thing work too :( probably we need to try again when tech advances a few extra steps, eg. neural-interfaces + pervasive-AI + usable distributed financial tech. and use the tech properly to make the openness and interlinking irreversible!
It’s not a question of can they, but have they yet. Don’t police officers already have access to this data therefore the feds definitely do?
The boom in location based advertising a decade ago was the final nail in this coffin because it made the availability of location tracking data required and highly accessible.
Android's GLS service has an absolute insane data ingestion pipeline consisting of sensor fusion from GPS, Wifi, accelerometer, barometric data, and cell tower locations. It's accurate to within meters, can locate you inside buildings, can count your footsteps, and even knows what floor you've been on.
It's been used by Google to tune its indoor WiFi maps and improve location accuracy for years.
Anyone who has high location accuracy mode turned on and has Google Play Services has already been unwittingly uploading "anonymized" location data multiple times an hour for literally years. In many cases such anonymized data is accurate to within a meter and contains accelerometer data that can literally count your footsteps and determine if you are walking, running, riding in a car, etc. Anonymized GLS data is what informs traffic congestion and many other "non scary" services.
Google believes the negotiation of a 7-day expiration of randomized UID is sufficient anonymization to meet the legal definition in all of its markets. It might be right about the legal definition. It's wrong if it believes it actually anonymizes data. Google believes a popup notifying that high accuracy mode may upload "anonymized usage data" to Google's services constitutes informed consent according to GDPR. I think the EU would disagree if they knew the technical capabilities of Google's infrastructure.
Google's internal privacy review system believes that they are safeguarding the privacy of its users. Their model does not take into account NSLs or interference from intelligence agencies. And it absolutely did not foresee this.
The surveillance dystopia is here, folks, and your Android phone won't do anything noticeably different. They'll flip some switches in their ingestion pipeline and have an insanely powerful draconian surveillance network instantly.
It's over.
This capability is precisely what we need to generate data that can be used to resolve this crisis and allow us to safely exit from quarantine.
The GDPR allows individuals to request access to their own data.
They can voluntarily share this with their health systems, communities, and governments, such as when testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. This doesn't have to be open-ended, just for recent data that could help track transmission and find other contacts.
On the flip side, individuals who don't know if they're carriers can plug their own data into a system that relates it with the movements of affected people and warns them if they need to get tested.
The state has had realtime, direct access to the data without a warrant or meaningful oversight on a query-by-query basis since the 14th of January, 2009, when Google joined the PRISM collection program.
It would be a very simple matter to expand that access to send wider selections of data. It may already have the capability to perform such queries.
I'm in for the Vitamins, not for tracking.
Majority have been doing it unwittingly, true. But you do get services in return. I actually know about the collection, and in case of Google, in my opinion I get compensated in a reasonable way. I'm contributing to wigle and osm as well to counteract the monopoly, but in practice - it's worth it. We could attach some risk to everything and consider what would happen if gov abused it, but we'll all have some threshold of saying "I'm ok with it in exchange for participation in modern society" (it can be re-evaluated later of course)
The alternative is to not accept any of the risks and live in a disconnected commune. Which is ok if that's what you're after, but... that won't apply to most people.
Its as if you can't even imagine a world where you get some of these benefits but where your privacy is protected either legally or technically. Both are totally possible, but your lazy attitude about it is part of the problem.
One of these days all this data we've just been casually giving out is going to be used for a pogrom or some other terrible thing and then it will be too late for this facile "the benefits outweigh the costs" bullshit.
No it won't, because the horrible, but realistic, take is that the benefits indeed will outweigh the costs. For all the people who are not targets of the pogroms.
Horrible as it sounds, a lot of people don't really care about things that happen to other people. Even if those other people die. Especially when the other people are not like them.
Sometimes I wonder whether apathy is the true root of evil, not really money. I'm no different, I'm guilty of that tendency towards apathy as well. I'm certainly up in arms about privacy, but I really don't get the same way about women's issues. Nor black guys being gunned down by cops in their apartments. I may lament those situations, but I certainly don't donate money or time to those and other causes.
Point is, root of the issue is that no one cares. Everyone has their own concerns. Which is democracy. And that's great.
But inherent in that environment is a kind of built in "divide and conquer" quality that provides political and economic élites a convenient control mechanism.
Then there's the technical issue of: We can't guarantee no collection right now, without rebuilding internet from scratch. Then we need to solve the spam/credible information problem again without existing identity information.
So again, unless you want to live in a disconnected undocumented commune, you're drawing your own acceptance line somewhere. If you don't have own solutions to propose, calling others lazy is a bit of glass house situation.
oH BUt It'S NoT a waLLeD GArdEn!1
ffs.
You want a privacy-friendly browser like Firefox? No, you are only allowed to use a Firefox skin on good old Safari instead.
You want local ad/tracker blocking? No way, you are allowed to use a VPN instead, and hope it doesn't sell your data too.
You want to jailbreak and stroll outside the corral? Better hope iOS keeps having zero-days, because there's no official way, and Apple actively works against the unofficial way.
I understand Apple will never implement this because ads and a captive audience are a crucial part of their business model; I just resent that Apple actively blocks people that want to implement this themselves.
If you go for the free Starbucks Wi-Fi plan on a tablet, you have some chance but you need to always have access to this kind of proxied connection. Additionally, you are likely to get fingerprinted fairly quickly based on services used and how the ad networks cross target. At the very least, they will know when and where you are at that Starbucks. I really think we have lost. The best we can hope for is E2EE baked into secure chips on our devices to at least protect our messaging.
The problem is if the try to form conclusions from the data collected that would concern me too.
If more people were aware what data Google collects, I believe far more people would be careful with Google services.
What is true is that Android basically become a shitty OS, something open source should have prevented, but we know how that turned out.
I don't think that I miss anything with opting out of it to be honest.
Of course, the range of the transmitters is lower because the signals get absorbed by materials in the way. Trees and buildings absorb the radiation, and attenuate it, and thus, to be effective requires the installation of untold numbers of transmitters covering the world. If trees and buildings absorb the radiation, you can bet that your body and brain absorb them as well. We used to keep cell towers far away from people's homes; now we are putting higher frequency transmitters right in front of them. 5G is for surveillance and control. It is a weapon and this weapon is being pointed into people's bedrooms.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/17/we-know-script-...
I would support that BUT I also understand how that might open the "pandora's box" for all other government requests/laws like the existing geofencing warrant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies...
Still, if this were done in a truly open way, and the criteria for ending the program were clearly specified at its outset, it's something I could support. Looking at the Chinese response, advanced and extensive contact tracing has allowed them to restart significant commerce in areas where initial outbreaks have been controlled through social distancing. Doing the same here might not only save lives, but also livelihoods.
Of course I would be nervous about the potential for overreach, misuse, and acclimatization. But if the allowable uses and time-frame were set into law, perhaps those concerns would be outweighed by the potential benefits.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/18/google_geofence_war...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-loc...
I read the first one in detail, and it's not Google Maps, but worse, it's cell phone location data for all phones, for up to a decade, probably more, in a database called SensorVault. So it can be used as a global surveillance database.
This is not surprising, since data companies always have a database like this, but we should have privacy laws in place to limit retention time and access.
Source: DBA.
They were with the Patriot Act, though. And many of its provisions are still being routinely extended.
The problem is that once all this data starts flowing in, government agencies who want to use it will find loopholes to apply it in scenarios it wasn't intended to be used, but which the law didn't anticipate. And then, once it proves useful for something important, they'll point at it as the evidence that it's too useful to allow to expire. Again, we've seen that with Patriot Act - originally passed solely to "combat terrorism", DoJ is now justifying their asks for extensions by, among other things, the need to fight child porn. Which means that any politician who votes to not extend it, risks being painted by their opponents as aiding and abetting sexual predators.
This has all the potential to be an order of magnitude worse. A real-time location database for practically every person in US would get all law enforcement agencies salivating immediately. And worse yet, it will actually let them solve otherwise unsolvable crimes etc, and set up a showcase. Probably terrorism and/or child porn again, because it pushes so many emotional buttons at once. And who would dare say that it's not justifiable, because child porn is less of an issue than coronavirus? More importantly, who would get elected after saying that?
That's the real danger of creeping police state - it works more or less as advertised, and it's just too easy to ignore all the "abstract" stuff about freedom and privacy (until you're its target - but most people don't expect to be one, and most of them won't be). So every inch that it gets is nearly impossible to wrestle back.
General levels of social distancing can be gleaned without phone location info. All you need to do is have police drive around and look.
The problem with requests like this, for detailed phone data, is that everyone can imagine vague benefits in the abstract, and wants to be helpful, so you're more willing to cede protections of privacy (which are ultimately protections of liberty). But those vague abstract benefits don't necessarily translate into actual benefits if you think it through.
I don't see anything necessary about phone surveillance at this time whatsoever. What is necessary is mass testing.
In China they also have an app where anyone can see locations where an infected person has been, and how recently, both so they can avoid those places, but also so they can feel more confident being out in society otherwise (in areas without significant current outbreaks). This video demonstrates how it works in one Chinese city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=YfsdJGj3-jM&...
I agree with many of the problems pointed out, but it does appear that the benefits during the pandemic would be significant.
South Korea only tracks the locations of people who were confirmed to have been infected, and cross-checks their location data with CCTV footage as well as credit card records. That's a lot of data, but only for certain people. For each case outside of the Daegu area, local governments are tasked with publishing a list of locations and timestamps -- easily visualized on a map -- to help others figure out if they were in the same place at the same time as an infected person. There is no need to track the other people, as they would show up at testing centers on their own. Also, the people in charge of doing all the tracking have no obvious ties to law enforcement. The government is not a monolithic institution; there are both legal and technical barriers to sharing data among the various agencies. The police in S.K. only gets involved when known-infected people refuse to cooperate, since it's a crime to interfere with an epidemiological investigation.
I'm not sure who "the feds" referred to in the article are, but if they have any ties to law enforcement or are asking for data about an unnecessarily large number of people, beware!
Yes, there are other ways to do this tracking and contact tracing, but they are much more labor-intensive and imperfect. Governments can and should still do this, but once a certain percentage of the population becomes infected, it's no longer feasible. Also the more contacts that are missed through these tracking measures, the more potential avenues for spread. Hence the attractiveness of a system that would both be more comprehensive and require much more manual work.
What they really want is full take -- the complete location movements of the US population. This would be useful for COVID-19 tracking ... and authoritarian control.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Hong-Kong-tell...
Up until the virus, they were mandating no face covering so their all seeing surveillance camera network could see your face.
1) Come up with a system for tracking it at points of entry.
2) Create a system and process for containment once it’s no longer contained.
Also, on the question of authoritarianism, I think there is a case for greater tolerance of it during a defensive war, where a nation is battling for its survival. And I think a pandemic can be characterised as a defensive war against an invisible, completely merciless enemy. Not to say that blanket authoritarianism should be allowed but measures that make sense and help in the battle should be shown greater tolerance for a limited duration. Of course this is the whole idea behind (duration limited) emergency powers legislation. Going back to Taiwan, their 40 years of martial law also shows the risk of abuse, however I would describe the KMT as an invading power, not a native, somewhat trusted authority (as is more the case with their present, democratically elected government).
A Taiwanese friend mentioned that the majority of indigenous peoples of Taiwan support the KMT rather than the DPP (the current party in power).
I suppose for them, all Han Taiwanese are “colonists” but the KMT gave them more benefits.
There could also be the option of logging nearby Bluetooth addresses locally only and looking up an online database of infected owners, or submitting collected data online to allow aggregation and preemptive notifications of potential exposure before symptoms show
You could also have app-level 24-hour rolling identifiers to prevent non-infected people's contacts from being correlated over time, even locally—if that would make people more comfortable using such an app. (The app would have to keep track of all its previous identifiers; if the user is found to be infected, all their previous identifiers would be marked as such in the database.)
Some challenges off the top of my head:
- What polling rate is needed? (How do disease experts define a "contact"?) What's the battery impact?
- What fraction of the population has BLE-capable phones?
- What fraction of the population keeps their phones physically on their person as they go about their day?
- Can distance be roughly inferred from RSSI? Does the mapping of RSSI to distance vary much depending on the transmitting radio / phone model?
- If you live in an apartment, you might be identified as a "contact" of your neighbor even if you never breathe the same air, etc.
in 2004 the authorities planned how to respond to this crisis, and got the necessary rights. Then they spent 15 years not abusing these rights, and now used them effectively (including phone data).
The middle part is important there, the one about "15".
However, once asked to go home. Enforcement will used current location data.
The government had initially tried to have parliament authorize this measure - but the "secret services" committee, discussing the matter, did _not_ approve immediately, requiring more information. So the government just used one of the draconian powers it has... thanks to anti-Palestinian legislation.
The tracking will _not_ be limited to covid-19 patients.
It is a total travesty.
It should be said in fairness that the legal infrastructure for this has been laid over a decade ago with the "Big Brother" law and the General Security Service law. People were silent about it then, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
If I understand the Hill article correctly, the US discussion is about the same kind of data ('An unnamed OSTP official told The Washington Post that they were “encouraged by American technology companies looking to leverage, aggregate, anonymized data to glean key insights for COVID-19 modeling efforts.”'), yet the majority of the comments seem to be assuming that it's about tracking individuals' locations to enable contact tracing. I don't get that impression from the Hill article at all.
What's actually being proposed, while not unproblematic, sounds rather more palatable than the authoritarian nightmare that's being discussed here.
I also want to point out, there are low tech solutions to track and control coronavirus spread. Simply isolate infected or suspected people, not in their homes, but in a hospital built specially for the purpose. Chinese did that.
Whether this is preferable to mass surveillance is your choice. I think it has merits and is less authoritarian overall.
Unfortunately the GNSS (GPS) is on one chip with modem, but otherwise great feature to have killswitches for cameras and comms.
Google tracks location history from GPS and this is accurate to at most a few meters and it can be use to check if people walked by each other on the street.
As far as I know phone service providers don't have anything similar. The cell you're connected to can cover an entire neighborhood.
Also, the submission title is simply missing a word: the article uses "Federal government in talks [...]" which is a very conventional usage, whereas "Federal" as a standalone noun is considerably more rare.
I'll update to at least be colloquially correct.
Thanks!
> We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.
Looks like that'll cover the rest of us..
The lack of trust in the US is really disappointing. Americans are so proud of its democracy---yet consistently hate and distrust the government.
I fear at the end of all of this, it'll be like the line at the end of The Big Short: "They will be blaming immigrants and poor people."
Chelsea Manning comes to mind, and that's just in the past month.
> "The conversation is dominated by the fear of gov't abuse. So few point to how successfully South Korea has leveraged their vast surveillance infrastructure to tackle this problem while maintaining a vibrant democracy. (When's the last time the US actually imprisoned a leader? Or even held a powerful person to account without pardon?)"
South Korea isn't all sunshine and roses either. They had numerous military coupes in post-war half of the 20th century. One of their dictators was sentenced to death for massacring hundreds of pro-democracy protestors, but was then pardoned for this. Things might not be so bad in South Korea currently, but the nastier stuff is still in living memory today. South Koreans would be wise to tread carefully when empowering their government. I think the cautious attitude modern Germans have towards these matters is a good approach: "Never again" rather than "It could never happen again."
As for the attitudes of Americans, no organization nor individual is entitled to trust; trust must be earned. Insofar as Americans don't trust their government, it's because their government hasn't earned their trust. On the contrary, the American government has frequently violated whatever little trust anybody has in it. Modern America may not have any recent military dictatorships like South Korea, but there is nevertheless a lot of disturbing unpleasantness in recent history.
However, given that it seems that the American gov't hasn't earned its citizens trust after ~300 years, perhaps it's time to try something very different, or at least have an open mind to suggestions. Several countries now have demonstrated a range of options: China, SK, Taiwan, Singapore. Some are authoritarian, others are democratic. It may be time to stop arguing why each case won't work here and give it a chance.
[0] http://www.apms.cz/novinky/mobilni-operatori-pomahaji-trasov...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/17/white-h...
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean...
I'm hoping after this is all over perhaps the public might finally be in a mood more conducive to sitting down and discussing things in a reasonable manner, without the involvement of government and their corporate influence, and ideally on a platform with minimum censorship, and has a solution for dealing with ideological issues that have ruined so much of the rest of social media.
In order for the data to be uncompromised there would need to be a mandate to carry the phone everywhere.
If not participating meant being cast out of society, some people might be okay with that.
How should we handle it?
Apple should be working on this.
After the virus is contained or has burned out everyone deletes the app. No feds snooping at location data required.
I think that would be a terrible idea. Not everyone in the world is a rational-thinking HackerNews reader ;). I would imagine it would lead to cases of mob-mentality which could be very thoughtful like community support for food/necessity delivery but also cases of unfortunate mob-mentality that could be very bad.
> You could then use that to check in to shops etc. and not be allowed in without showing status
This is exactly what's being done in China. But without the map of your neighbours. Everyone (that cares to go out) has a 'green' 'amber' 'red' status code via Ali or Tencent. Green indicates fine, Amber indicates movement (provincial or international, sometimes inter-city depending on province) within the past 14 days, Red indicates suspected.
As the title makes clear, this is about the government gaining access to that information.
When it comes to gov’t, I share a healthy dosage of mistrust. This is one of the reasons I support the second amendment. But remember that the gov’t are of the people and for the people. It is THE institution to defend our individual selves against threats we can’t individually battle. As Michael Lewis puts it, we have got to stop gutting the gov’t due to reactionary fear-mongering and mistrust. We are only robbing ourselves and our children of their future. This is a reason to feel patriotic for me.
Such apps are already deployed in china: https://youtu.be/YfsdJGj3-jM?t=303
We don't trust the government but what if it's just a private company who does it? Google already has your location info: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline They are definitely already using the information in aggregate to provide traffic jam info. Hell I am sure facebook already does this for suggesting friends too. On the balance of privacy vs social good, I don't think there's even much slippery slope left to protect.
The data will be analyzed to understand the mobility of German residents.
So it's not real time tracking but it's still tracking.
Your location can still be determined by at least your service provider based on the strength of the signal it emits as received from the (presumably various) antenna sites in the area.
The only way to avoid this is to turn your phone off/disconnect from the network. Sadly network access and coarse location logging are impossible to unlink.
If you truly have no cellular or WiFi connectivity, nothing will be tracking your location. However, hardware kill switches are the only way to be sure of that. Or physically messing with the hardware.
If I have your location data, you are not anonymous anymore. Especially these days where you likely spent most hours of the day in your home.
Cell phone location data helps to suggest if a person has travelled to certain location with their regular phone but that is about it.
New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. explains in this video, and in this article:
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1238604080571772928
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/health/coronavirus-china-...
I hope.
Explicatory edit: The CCP, like every government in history, is motivated to conceal its human rights abuses. China also lacks a free press, an important window into its current events. Accordingly, there are obstacles in the way of justly assessing China’s response to this crisis.