Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

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The government tracking everyone's location all the time would be/is a gross infringement on privacy. The government tracking everyone's location for a limited time period in order to curb a deadly epidemic seems much more reasonable. The difficulty is trusting them to give back that power when the crisis is over. If not for the experience of the Patriot Act, I'd be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt there.

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.

> But if the allowable uses and time-frame were set into law

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.

This is happening already - anyone who use Google map has their location data collected for the past 10 years with default setting. Police can issue geofencing warrant against the location/time and Google will share that data.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/18/google_geofence_war...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-loc...

Thanks for the links.

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.

There is no need to track everyone's location, even for a limited time.

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!

Once you know someone was infected, you need to go back and see where they've been up to that point. That's only possible if you're tracking everyone. Of course you don't need to keep the tracking data on everyone for more than ~14 days.

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.

Is it reasonable to track everyone's detailed location during a pandemic though? What purpose does it serve in the absence of good molecular testing info, which would be an even grosser violation of privacy?

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.

It's very helpful, because as soon as someone has symptoms or tests positive, you automatically know everyone they've come into contact or close proximity with, and can have those people isolate. You can also better determine whom to test, since there is nowhere near the testing infrastructure to blanket test everywhere.

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.

They could make an app and work with Apple/Google to have it auto-installed, but where the app can be uninstalled by the user if they wish to opt out.

... and sunset this so once it’s cured, remove the capability whatsoever. But it wont

Google could just give OLAP access to feds. They already have all the data needed thanks to Maps.

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