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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

If I go outside, I would like to have an app that does this on my phone. My "right to privacy" isn't worth putting other peoples' health at considerable risk for.

There isn't even a scenario I could imagine where one of these apps would do something that I would consider a severe infringement of my privacy.

A few million lives may ultimately hang in the balance, so there ought to be a very compelling argument against not putting these apps into practice and getting ahead of coronavirus.

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If you are concerned about this, the app is the least of your worries because BLE and MAC addresses are already being used to track your movements, for commercial purposes. For example inside stores.

Additionally, many many apps silently gather and sell this data, without your knowledge, and with "consent" being ignored or being relegated to privacy statements that are too vague to understand that they are doing this.

I really hope that if people are concerned at all in any way about the tracking app mentioned here that they also learn that such tracking is being used extensively in industry right now.

I'm surprised how few people on HN seem to know this. If any audience should know and warn our friends and neighbors, it's the audience at HN.

So we get the reverse of the reasonable behavior. People - and I mean tech people, not Joes and Janes Random - freak out over using movement tracking to fight a pandemic, while they willingly accept the same tech being used by advertisers.

It's like people want to suffer.

by all means, you are free to make this tradeoff for yourself. but you don't get to decide what other people's privacy should be worth to them.

> There isn't even a scenario I could imagine where one of these apps would do something that I would consider a severe infringement of my privacy.

do you live in the united states? there have been quite a few privacy fiascos in the last couple decades that the general public found unimaginable until they were exposed.

Some would argue that willfully going outside while you’re infected is the more risky and irresponsible behavior on your part.

The whole idea is that the app would alert you if you may be infected so that you don't go out.

The problem is that sometimes people who don't yet know they are infected have contact with other people before anyone in the story finds out that they are infected. The apps allow the communication to happen:

1. Even if the people who had contact don't know each other.

2. Faster.

That's how we get ahead of the virus.

Contact tracing is a precursor to testing. An app flagging you as a potential positive doesn’t mean that you self-quarantine for x days, rather it means that you get tested asap. And this has to happen every time you get flagged. Otherwise there’s just no point in using those apps. Eventually the entire neighborhood would be flagged.

Not sure what the downvote is for.

Is this all this tracking achieves? I personally assume that I'm infected until proven otherwise. Even if proven, I can get infected a day later. I don't need a tracker to tell me this.

The US is predicting 60k deaths. Millions is quite an exaggeration. Would you still give up your privacy to save a few thousand lives?

60k if everyone stays in lockdown for the rest of time/until vaccine developed and mass vaccination achieved

source: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/09...

Millions doesn't seem like an exaggeration:

1. The US, despite currently suffering the most, will probably not end up being the country with the most casualties. Once covid-19 takes hold in more densely populated poorer countries, there will be immense suffering.

2. 1918 flu cost up to 100 million lives, 1957 flu about a million lives, and 1968 flu about a million lives.

3. Total deaths worldwide is already >100k, and the known cases are still less than 0.03% of the population.

Would I give up my privacy to save a few thousand lives? Yes, but the scenario is incorrect. There isn't really a privacy sacrifice involved. I'm trying to think of the worst-case scenario in terms of privacy, but there just isn't one. Someone finds out that a device with ID 00:11:22:33:FF:EE spent 15 minutes with a device with ID 01:31:24:53:EF:AE. It's not worth so many people losing their lives for.

60k deaths in the US on a population of 330M, guess how much that would mean for the world? 7700M/330M * 60K = 1.4M.

OP is absolutely right.

Countries with lower standard of healthcare than the US will have a higher death rate.

It’s also surely an undercount in the US. We’ll get accurate numbers when all cause mortality comes out. In Europe the totals were underestimated by a factor of two in most countries.

For example, in NYC, this chart shows roughly 5500 excess deaths on april 4th. Whereas on that day nyc had only counted 3500 coronavirus deaths.

https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1248905714124414976/...

The US is an extreme example, their news stations were downplaying it and calling it a hoax, they didn't follow social distancing in most places until it was too late, they were late to the "this is not the flu" party by a month and grossly incompetent leadership combined with the CDC literally lying to its people === the perfect storm.

Further, those numbers are based on NYC hospitals being completely overwhelmed which sky rocketed the death rate. If a country can flatten their curve what is happening in New York doesn't have to happen again.

The US is pretty much in the middle of the pack when it comes to how typical western democracies have responded to the crisis.

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US already has 20k deaths and only 500k confirmed infections. Not all of those infections have had an outcome and not all infected have been confirmed so it's hard to do an exact calculation but based on that data more than a million deaths is very likely. So yeah, it's worth it.

Not sure about your math there, a million deaths in the US seems impossible, worst case 100-200k. Did you mean the world? Even that seems a bit high.

Impossible? Why? 1% infection fatality rate with 70% population infected would give 2 million.

Plus you're saying that based on the current data. The fatality rate only worsens as the infection rate goes up and hospitals become even more overwhelmed.

The reputable estimates for IFR aren't suggesting 1%, thankfully.

True, but no estimate is lower than 0.3%, which is still very high (600,000+ dead in the USA). The next step in walking back the fatality rate of course will be to define an IFR that's "net of people who were probably going to die soon anyways".

Where’s your source for that worst case? All credible sources are in the 7 figure range until we get a vaccine or reliable drug regimen.

Conversely, you could argue that your "right to health" isn't worth putting other people's privacy at considerable risk for.

You have no privacy to protect if you are not alive.

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