We can't trust Apple/Google to manage the anonymous data behind Contract Tracing but we can for our photos, phone calls, messages, web history, app data and GPS locations.
And we have to be fearful because this anonymous data is somehow going to be linked by Apple/Google to real persons and used for mass surveillance. But yet they could have done this for years without needing GACT as an excuse.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. See https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...:
"The Contact Tracing Bluetooth Specification does not use location for proximity detection. It strictly uses Bluetooth beaconing to detect proximity."
1. the telcos have months - if not years - of LAC update data stored for every phone. They know where you sleep, who visits and where you work and shop;
2. they analyse the CDR for every call/SMS send and received (caller and receiving party cells) [look at your spam SMS with a jaundiced eye];
3. they 'ping' thousands of phones* daily to trilaterate the location to metres (and/or A-GPS, TDOA, etc.)
4. they analyse the voice and data handover records.
* The preferred way to do this with a veneer of deniability is for the authorities to add in a few phones into the known associates list of phones to be monitored in an otherwise legitimate drug or terrorist warrant. They judges will never know (and certainly don't ask).
I believe there are other ways to fight viruses, we (the world) should invest massively in biological R&D to better understand, protect, control and heal our body rather than track people. Tracking people is a low-level solution that misses the bigger picture.
Maybe this will be possible in 50 or 200 years, but the world we currently live in is not ready to both track people and respect basic human rights, in my opinion.
By the way : same argument is valid for nuclear weapons. Why don't we accept that all countries get nuclear weapons? Because it would be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Not doing participating yet continuing to move about society as it starts to reopen, prior to a vaccine, seems more morally problematic in my mind.
Just because our rights are already eroded doesn't mean we should give up the fight and disable our freedom.
Nobody said we should trust Google/Apple with any of that. This tracking of our anonymous data should only be allowed to be unencrypted by warrant. All data produced by the device stored on the cloud should be encrypted, unaccessable to Google and Apple.
Instead of blindly trusting corporations, we could implement regulations, allowing oversight and preventing unreasonable searches.
In any case, I use an Android phone and Google can't access my photos, calls, messages, web history, app data, or GPS locations. I've chosen a radio firmware which completely disables the GPS.
Looks like it's about time to get rid of Google completely from my Google phone.
Also, the Apple implementation requires user to manually approve access to user private tokens each and every time for apps trying to access them.
I used to work at a telco and we absolutely knew your location based off base station triangulation. And we knew who you called and messaged and who was nearby to you.
i.e. most folks in favor of GACT adoption see the alternative path, of using actual location data without opt in and operated by the government, as a scarier erosion of privacy.
You cannot use this system to determine if two people have been in contact. It doesn’t have the capability.
All you can tell is if one person who explicitly participates in the system has had contact with one or more of any of the other people who explicitly participate in the system who indicates they are infected, but not which people.
My understanding is that given someone else's daily key, it can tell you whether you were in contact with that specific key.
So anonymity relies on not knowing who had that key. But the (as yet unspecified) authority collecting "infected" keys will certainly know who submitted what, so you are relying on their secrecy.
If you assume a malicious app installed on both party’s phones, then you might be able to do it... but then again, if you have that you don’t really need this system to track contacts.
(I think on one side, you’d have to collect the daily keys and associate them when a person’s identity. Then, when you want to check a contact, you would then need to trigger an “infection” because otherwise the keys don’t leave the device. This requires user interaction, BTW, so there would be some kind of special social engineering effort to get someone to report themself as infected or else you the phone needs to be unlocked in the possession of a malicious party — or you have to hope to get “lucky” in that the person actually gets infected within 14 days of the timeframe of interest.
For the other party, you’d have to feed only the specific ids of the known people you want to check against to the matching API — it only tells you if there’s a match, not which match, so unless you’re checking only one, you’d have to use a process of elimination to work it down to a specific person. I wonder if that API might be throttled, though, or otherwise limited to make that less effective.
With the requirement to have malicious, cooperating apps on both sides you don’t need the Apple/Google system and you could get more useful info, like location, and with less user interaction.)
Actually you can't trust them to manage the other things either. Google is notorious for abusing user data for advertising purposes and their dark patterns. Two recent investigations by the Norwegian data protection agency highlights this clearly.
Anything on iOS touching iCloud is assumed to be accessible to at least the government where the phone user resides. Their on-device privacy's much better, but the defaults are to use iCloud extensively.
Privacy isn’t on/off.
Just because it was possible indirectly before, it doesn’t mean direct tracing should be waved-through.