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Comment by soufron | Hacker News Reader

If I might, digital surveillance technologies cannot actually help fight the pandemic. It's a fantasy. What can hep are masks, medicines and good hygiene practices. Everything else is only the use of shock doctrine to push old agendas. If you're interested, that's what I argued in the French newspaper Liberation:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...

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Well, at least this one study seems to conclude that surveillance can in fact help: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie... I seem to have heard that there were other studies concluding similar things, but can't find another one right now.

Even privacy advocates have argued that apps can, if developed well, be useful if developed with privacy in mind. See the link by the CCC or this post by Linus Neumann, who is affiliated with the CCC (only in German, unfortunately): https://linus-neumann.de/2020/03/corona-apps-sinn-und-unsinn...

Sadly, effective response to infectious disease throughout history have all added to the authoritarian toolbox to necessarily limit individual freedom because we know individual responsibility does not scale. While individual irresponsibly at scale has calamitous consequences in context of infectious disease. Cordon sanitaire / quarantines in response to disease outbreaks have been the impetus for consolidation of government power. Historically this has been coarse geographic control where regions are locked down or movement of people is restricted for months to years - 160 years between Austria and Ottoman empire. Much like the total shutdown of countries we're seeing now that refuse to adopt more granular control enabled by surveillance technology. Sacrificing privacy to manage individual affects on collective risk is going to be an inevitable component of modern life moving forward if we want to return to any semblance of the old "normal". A normal where most people did not care much about privacy either.

When you say cannot actually help fight the pandemic do you have any reason to believe they won't work from a scientific point of view?

Sorry if I have missed it, but to me your arguments were privacy issues and the technical difficulties (different platforms, Support) to get an app on enough smartphones to reach the critical number of participants. Don't get me wrong I totally agree, these are things that we first need to find a solution. But your post sounded to me like you have the opinion that contact tracing doesn't work.

What about this study? https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.ab...

sadly, it doesn't matter whether you're right (in a rational-technical sense from a engineering perspective).

Fear makes more people react emotionally.

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