Hacker News Reader

Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Promising opt-in is a bit disingenuous. These tech giants are creating a technological capability. Whether or not it is opt-in, opt-out or mandatory is then decided by governments, now and in the future.

This is of course nothing new. But it's worth noting considering how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action currently is and how extremely weak any resistance is bound to be.

I'm not saying I'm against contact tracing in the current situation. But that shiny new button that governments get to press will never go away.

Edit: Reading the spec, I found a piece of information that may be of interest: This technology allows contact tracing without necessarily revealing the location where that contact has taken place. So that could indeed be a privacy benefit over alternative approaches.

https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...

View on HN

They already have the shiny button. They can compel cell phone companies to give this data to the government already, without you knowing about it.

At least this way you will get some control of the info and you'll know what was collected and have control of it's disclosure (for now).

In other words, this is no worse than what the government is already capable of, it just makes it easier for you to share the data with health care providers.

The government already has all these abilities.

> They can compel cell phone companies to give this data to the government already

Bluetooth has a quite small range, which may give higher tracking precision (to anyone receiving the signal) than the data cell phone companies have.

The capability of using the Bluetooth stack for tracking is not new, this proposal limits the way that data can be used. See the cryptographic specification linked below.

The alternative would be GPS which some governments are looking at now. It might give higher precision with a grid of location data to enhance it, but I would assume the protocol prevents this eg by some randomization of ids?

GPS is completely unidirectional from satellites to receivers and thus the satellites cannot be used to track the receivers

The receivers can be made to report their GPS data back for tracking purposes.

What skuhn said. That is what the solution the Norwegian and Danish government is implementing is supposedly doing. Reporting the GPS data back to a central server. If you’re using iPhone.

https://www.simula.no/news/digital-contact-tracing-qa#How%20...?

Currently, yes, but "numerical results with a system operating at 39 GHz show that sub-meter 3D positioning accuracy is achievable in future mmW 5G networks" :)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09478

Little did we know, 5G didn't cause Covid but Covid will cause 5G...

Bluetooth 5.1 devices can do both distance and direction, so if you have a bunch of beacons you can determine your location to sub-meter accuracy.

iPhones don't have Bluetooth 5.1 yet, and I'm assuming no Android phones either.

Qualcomm's latest flagship soc (865) with 5G has Bluetooth 5.1 support as far as I know.

This app appears to use peer to peer Bluetooth between phones, not beacons. The intention is to determine relative proximity between users, not absolute position.

Tracking isn't just by connection. Their point is that bluetooth tracking (by beacon or otherwise) is already a thing - many major retailers and franchises already do it.

It's ridiculously easy to turn any Bluetooth device into a beacon. All you have to do is configure the BLE advertising frame for the device and then set the device to advertise. I can turn my laptop into a beacon in about 5 minutes(some web searching to remember exact commands and formats).

Realistically, what does sub-metre accuracy help with "evil" (catch-all for all non-disease-related) surveillance that, say, a 5-10m is insufficient for?

"Evil" is a bit loaded, but what that level of accuracy does is let you say "this person was in front of the shelves for products X, Y and Z" as opposed to "this person was probably in the store".

Hyper localized association. Like, for example, a dissident organizing a local chapter of some organization who disperses information via in person hand offs of handwritten papers every. In this example, their hand off point, in a small town of tens of thousands, is the Saturday farmers' market that runs from 8 until 5 or so. They and their conspirators all went to the farmers' market regularly before so it's completely natural for them to appear within 5-10 meters of each other a few Saturdays a month (usually because the three most popular food trucks have long lines right next to each other). Except now "evil" can roll up the ringleader and see a pattern of who passed within an arm's reach every time the ringleader got a message from the head organization without actually spending the resources to surveil anyone in person.

"Evil" usually doesn't care enough about most people to spend significant resources surveiling them. The danger in dropping that threshold is that "evil" invents new ways to exploit any efficiency.

I'm pretty sure he was referring to cell tower location data, not bluetooth. Though cell tower location data has low resolution, in the order of a few 100 feet to several miles. Not useful for contact tracing.

5g, I have heard, allows more fine-grained positioning.

There is also another idea floating - let the phones emit an ultrasound - then the other phone can estimate proximity, by the volume or delays.

Thanks. I wasn’t using my battery anyways.

none of the proposed tracking methods are without additional battery consumption, as far as I can tell..

Just have everyone wear QR code name tags

It's much worse because it won't have judicial oversight.

Unfortunately neither does existing location data collecting.

that isn't a reason to be complacent about furthering governmental/corporate surveillance capabilities.

in fact, it should remind us to take away those prior surveillance capabilities, and demand any contact tracing system to give control to users and be fully off-limits to large power structures (e.g., only shared between users and researchers).

and being hard to do so is no excuse. we have millions of people we can work on the problem if it's so important to warrant such massive effort.

People are working on contact tracing, this takes care of one of the harder parts without dictating central control in a pretty sensible manner. Being wary of privacy adverse interests in this context is good but in this context makes little sense. This specification only touches the question of data leaving the device in ways that restrict what the outside party, in an RFC manner MUST wording, can do with the data.

It's pretty clear that we will get contact tracing applications in many parts of the world, regardless of any action Apple or Google might have taken. Might as well base it on something that does not compromise the user base wholesale.

They can compel, but also what they typically do is to purchase from them the data. That way they don't even need warrants. We tally need stronger regulations about sensitive information like that.

> At least this way you will get some control

doubt it.

The protocol is explicitly designed to not share information - the data does not contain location information, and the only thing that someone can do with that data is verify if they have seen some of the identifiers that were published by someone else.

> it just makes it easier for you to share the data with health care providers

I don't want to share any more information with these corporate heath care providers based on real world experience with them. Is that "allowed".

how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action

You could also view it as high demand for government functionality, with an accompanying commandeering of the governmental power by the public, which has leverage of its own. Consider, for example, that 1/3 of the country is on a rent strike right now, a proportion which will likely grow. That part of the polity is learning to flex its political muscle for the first time in a while, because the economic and political establishment suddenly finds itself at a severe disadvantage.

Of course, the government commands asymmetrical strength through police and (less directly) military force, but that's only effective insofar as disparate groups rarely have broad common interests that transcend regional, economic, or social boundaries. Since the internet provides many of the tools to facilitate collective action and COVID-19 has provided a sufficiently broad incentive, political incumbents are discovering that their powers are only as extensive as the willingness of people to cooperate and that they do in fact require the consent of the governed.

> Consider, for example, that 1/3 of the country is on a rent strike right now

Errr - no, no they aren’t. This month had approximately 12% more people miss their rent payment than last April.

That’s high - and bad news for people like my retired aunt and uncle, or father in law, who rely on the income from their rental property - but it’s hardly a national rent strike.

Not sure if the 1/3 is correct or not but consider this- that's the rise for April. Even people who live paycheck to paycheck can often find a way to scrounge together that money if they just lost their job. I'd say reserve judgement until we see how many people pay their rent in May.

Not paying your rent because you can’t afford it != joining a rent strike.

The rent strike movement is a political one, and has little to do with wether or not one can afford rent.

After a quit scan of the protocol and API outlined by Apple and Google: it looks privacy & technically sound to me.

I would remove the Android FAILED_REJECTED_OPT_IN status code (https://www.blog.google/documents/55/Android_Contact_Tracing...).

I cannot find it in the Apple API specs, but maybe it's not defined in there yet.

If it's a shiny button users get to press I have no problem with it, even if govs make it mandatory in the short term for things like public transport use or non-essential shops.

This should be an app users can install and uninstall, not a feature governments control.

PS Governments are already accessing your phone records and tracking behaviour without your permission, along with recording everything you do online for at least 30 days. O Tempora, o mores!

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-government-using-mobi...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora

Both Apple and Google have the exact location for all users for all time. Both can tell you right now, who you have been in contact with and how many folks they in turn have been in contact with.

They aren't building anything new, in fact, this is much less than they already have.

> Both Apple and Google have the exact location for all users for all time.

This is a false statement. With location services off, the providers only get coarse location via tower strengths and also via IP geolocation (everything phones home and leaks your IP constantly). It’s not exact, not by a long stretch.

Don’t forget WiFi router Mac address triangulation.

With location services off, I don’t believe that occurs.

Depends on the platform. Ultimately all you need is a list of the routers around you; SSID is often sufficient, but mac adddress is optimal since it can be sent to Google API [0] or similar for geolocation. I'm not sure about Android permissions. With iOS, it used to be (like 2 years ago) that any app could get the list of nearby access points, without permission. But AFAIK that was recently changed to be behind a prompt. Not sure if it's the same permission as location services or a different one.

[0] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geolocation...

I am done helping either company. What a breach of trust to hop on the 1984 bandwagon and we haven't even been trough a full cycle of this.

Do you really think that this feature has drawn a line in the sand where previously they couldn't track you and now they can?

No, it was already terrible before.

But it was labelled as terrible. I was for the secret service.

Now it's going to be culturally accepted, and in the hand regular administrators.

This is on order or magnitude worse, for something that was awful.

Because it's being used to fight something even more awful.

There are no good choices in a pandemic.

I wish I could share your optimism

This is a false dichotomy and assumes there are only two choices:

- not handling the pandemic

- tracking the population

You can get information about people assembling in other ways:

- helicopters

- intel gathering

- cops and army patrolling dressed as civilian

- create groups of citizen in town responsible to patrolling

And probably many I don't know about.

Then you add to that: keeping to communicate with the public, testing a lot, providing masks, etc.

The fact you are using this argument shows how much powerful the culture about "the end justify the mean" and "trusts the authority to deal with this" is.

I remember the first time I saw Jack Bauer on TV decapitating a terrorist in 24 to get an information. I though, "wow, they are really creating a new normal here".

That's what it is about: creating a new normal. And pretending there is no other choice, while nobody is trying to provide any.

There's no pretending there is no other choice, this already is a proposal for that "other choice". Contact tracing certainly isn't new, it's a required step in tackling many infectious diseases and will happen whether or not it is assisted by digital means. The technical alternatives to the tiny part proposed here are coarse and many of them more invasive in terms of privacy. This proposal is specifically designed to prevent tracking populations, it also limits the number of necessary off switches to the two OS vendors. What exactly is the part of the "new normal" you are worried about here? I hope it's not people walking around with tracking beacons in their pocket, they already do that without giving it a single thought.

It’s not about “people assembling” at all. It’s about individual prolonged contacts, possibly accidental (mass transit), with an infected person, allowing much more targeted (as opposed to current blunt tools like shelter at home orders) suppression of the disease.

In a pandemic, I think it’s fair to value public safety over privacy. What comes after the pandemic is a separate concern and discussion.

Public safety is not a human right, while privacy is.

If we abandon our commitments to human rights in times of crisis, how important are they to us, really?

> Public safety is not a human right, while privacy is.

Seriously? “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” is literally Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and 1&2 are “this applies to everyone; yes, we mean it”. Privacy is all the way down in Article 12.

I’ll take my life, health and freedom, for which targeted suppression of this disease is essential, over my privacy any time, thank you very much.

Life and “security of person” are not the same thing as safety.

You can't really have no privacy and freedom. Isn't that obvious?

> Edit: Reading the spec, I found a piece of information that may be of interest

Shouldn't you read the spec before commenting?

there's no button the government can press - the broadcast data is short term identifiers that can't be linked without know the day key. The identifiers are literally just a random 16 byte number derived sequentially from the day key.

The day key is only known if the user elects to publish those keys.

If you have a collection of day keys you don't know who published them as there's no device information in that.

> But that shiny new button that governments get to press will never go away.

I think that framing is slightly counterproductive to be honest. The alternative are efforts that, from what I see so far, seem to fall on one of two sides:

a) sensible privacy defaults like the proposal by Google/Apple, open development, limited traction in the community and not well connected to political decision makers

b) company initiatives, closed developments and promises of openness while working on centralized solutions

I feel like your scenario would be more worrying in terms of privacy if Google/Apple didn't introduce this protocol extension. They are essentially forcing the b) group to adapt something sensible. Another positive is that this seems limited to the OS level, whereas both have more extensive infrastructure they could have pushed for but intentionally did not.

tl;dr: I think it is a beneficial proposal and well placed, the alternative would likely be worse for the user base.

This functionality is already live in Find My iPhone. iPhones are performing these associations already. The bigger change is Android joining and sharing the data with researchers.

You do know that there also is a Find My Device service for Android that runs on all Android phones?

This is very different than what you think when you hear "find my iPhone|Android". Iirc the find my iPhone tech does phone to phone association to identify the location.

See: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...

This technology which has been announced but not released would, as your link states, ‘let you track down your stolen laptop, but not let anyone track you. Not even Apple.’ What issue do you have with that?

I have nothing against it :-) I was stating that what they were describing is nothing like what was implemented.

The proposed technology is quite different from a service that located located devices. Rather, it would track what devices have been in proximity of each other, and not necessarily where.

I was speaking to the question of whether governments would then demand access to the data. They could force Apple and the Telcos to turn over the data they are already collecting pre-corona. I was just saying that that risk isn't new.

>I was just saying that that risk isn't new.

every new method of geo-tracking is a new risk because it provides yet another hole for politicians to legally exploit into a privacy concern.

Speaking about the US -- GPS and tower-tracking pose many of the same risks, but since the legal mandates were discussed at different parts in history, their legal allowed uses are different from one another.

If yet another geo-tracking capability comes online that just allows legislators to put forward legislation that will allow them to abuse that specific technology rather than the previous ones that allow them the same access, but were mandated more responsibly.

In other words : each new law has to be inspected from so many angles that eventually the angles will exceed the inspection ability, and our privacy will dwindle without much argument as we'll be unable to modify legislation quickly enough to keep up with tracking technologies; this seems to be on purpose and being abused actively in the United States.

it doesn't track which phones are next to each other, just identifiers it has seen. Those identifiers roll frequently, and the material to find contact only occurs if a person chooses to publish that information, and all that information does is say what their keys were.

Determining if you were in the vicinity is also done on device - you get a list of all the day keys from a person who has chosen to share that information, then from that you can create all the keys they would have used in that period, and see if your device has ever seen one of those keys. Presumably if it finds a match the device/app would post a "you should get tested" message.

It'll be opt-in until an HN headline says it's not and then there are subsequent "post mortem" articles from Google with a bunch of PR gibberish saying "whoops it was an engineering mistake", by which point everyone's become acclimated to their technological presence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com