Showdown looms between Silicon Valley, U.S. states over contact tracing apps

I agree 100% with the Alphabet/Apple approach. There's no additional absolute location tracking. But it's easy to get the contact histories for all those infected.

If health authorities want to identify infection hotspots, they can request location histories from infected people and their contacts. That's no more than health authorities have requested in the past. It's just easier to produce, and more accurate.

My understanding of the proposal was that no third party including Google and Apple could access any real information from this. It honestly seemed like privacy was the primary consideration in the design. I realize that's a losing perception battle to fight.

> said location data is stored on a Microsoft Azure server that he rents and to which only he and one other person have the keys

Sorry, not good enough.

There are privacy-preserving cryptographic solutions to contract tracing. Anything less is unacceptable.

This is feature creep, now instead of knowing who has been close to infected people, they ‘need’ to know who has been close to whom and where many people have been close to each other.

Hardly surprising governments can’t stop talking about this once in a lifetime opportunity of peeking inside everyones private lives. Surely this information would never become available to secret services..

We're taking an approach that empowers individuals to take their data out of big tech companies and contribute it directly to their local healthcare providers and public health agencies: https://www.covidcontacttracing.com/.

This approach is highly practical -- the penetration (location history in Android, Google Maps) is already there, and we've already built out a set of tools around it to deliver insights to first-responders, epidemiologists and doctors, while ensuring individual privacy.

I think the only way to do effective contact tracing while respecting individual privacy and agency is to put the user in control of the data, and make sure that any data transfer is done with consent and deliberation.

The only way something like this would even be useful is if the majority of the population voluntarily downloaded this and opted-in to it.

Does anyone think that’s actually realistic? I’m not optimistic.

This is one of the great parts of America, personal liberties. But simultaneously one of the downsides of the individual > whole scheme, sometimes sacrifices hurt the individual but are good for the whole.

Quite the conundrum, once you go down the whole > individual route, where do you stop?

Are there any studies, or even computer models, which attempt to estimate the efficacy of contact tracing in a pandemic which already has double-digit prevalence?

> Some public health leaders and infectious disease doctors are questioning the timing of this launch. Galea said contact tracing is usually more effective at the beginning of an epidemic, before a disease like the coronavirus has spread.

> “I don’t know that it’s too late, it’s certainly late,” he says. “Had we had the tests and were we organized enough to do contact tracing right up front, it would have potentially taken us down a very different path in this epidemic.”

While we roll out the red carpet for the most invasive dragnet ever created, do we have any scientific reason to think it will be effective?

The long term ramifications scare me. Even if you use rolling ID's as suggested, someone with enough data points could infer identity from the patterns.

This might be more palatable if it were approached in an "old school" fashion. Start by clarifying your customer is not any public health authority; it's individual users. I could walk around with a notebook and keep track of everyone I interact with - even if some strangers aren't recorded by name (e.g. Cashier working aisle 6 at 3pm on Thursday). Design the app to mimic that task and make it easier for me.

I keep sovereignty over my records. If some agency wants them, they have to request them through me. Bake in meaningful, plausible deniability so I can simply say "sorry, I don't have any" if I don't like the name of the agency.

Better yet, use encryption such that both parties need to consent before any particular contact link can be inferred.

Make it so secure that you could broadcast the scrambled bits on a blockchain which any user can view through the lens of their private keys to check if they might have had contact. In a sense, this problem shares some characteristics with zero-knowledge proofs or anonymized financial transactions (all I need to know is I might have been exposed; not any details of how Covid found its way to me). Consider lessons learned hardening against crypto tracing efforts.

If people feel it's safe, effective and anonymous, enough may even opt-in organically of their own accord.

From https://blog.xot.nl/2020/04/19/google-apple-contact-tracing-...

> It is one thing to agree on a few best practices for contact tracing and force app providers to adhere to those standards. It is quite another to bake that standard into the operating system layer, active in the background, ready to be deployed. We have to trust Apple and Google to diligently perform this strict vetting of apps, to resist any coercion by governments

There are countless attacks on Bluetooth. GPS is not accurate enough for contact tracing. The data will not be reliable.

Imagine the lawsuits when dozens of people are required to mandatory quarantine away from home when someone (who they may not know) tests positive?

Proposal for MA use of contact tracing data (MIT is in MA and they have contributed to protocol design), https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/03/contact-tracing...

> then there’s the question of how to keep people who test positive isolated so that they don’t transmit the coronavirus. Some people will have room to isolate at home. But others who share bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms, or who live with someone at increased risk for a severe case of COVID-19, will be given some options. The Baker administration is looking at setting up isolation units in dormitories and hotels. People in isolation will need food delivery, possibly child care and lots of additional help so that they don’t interact with others.

Don't most homes share kitchens? Where are the dual-kitchen homes and apartments? This means virtually everyone who was within six feet of a positive contact would be isolated away from their home/family. So that can't scale, because there aren't enough quarantine hotels/dorms to house the entire population.

Every other pandemic in the history of pandemics focused on isolating high-risk groups. That is more practical than Tracing Theatre.

For me, my argument is this: yes the contact tracing apps could infringe on my privacy rights as an individual. But app could be effective in notifying potential exposed individuals. If that individual knows this information, he/she can take the right action to protect him/herself and his/her family. Thus the app protects people's right to live and right to good health. I know people always talk about right to free speech and movement etc, but I believe right to live is another human right, in fact, its the most important human right. Rights to free speech is useless if you are dead. Second, when the virus is not growing exponentially, this contact tracing capability would allows us to quickly stop emerging outbreaks, then we can feel comfortable to stop stay at home orders and open up the economy. Therefore, the app also protects right to movement.

So its a trade off, would you want to trade privacy rights to right to live and right to move? For me, it is yes.

In addition, we know that we can reduce the risk of privacy infringement by designing the system properly, as they are doing it here. We could also use block chain technology to implement the database so that no central authority can know which exact individual has been to where. The database could also not store personally identifiable information. We could use cryptographic computing techniques so that no one, not even the software engineers working the project can know which person has been to where.

I know people are scared about the potential privacy infringement here. But if we don't try to come up with effective ways to stop the spread of the virus, there are people dying due to getting sick. And there are families who could not feed themselves because we shut down the economy.

Remember when the CIA did fake swab tests in Pakistan to promote vaccinations, but it was just a smokescreen to catch Osama Bin Laden? Yeah, no... I’m not trusting PRISM Partners to enable this on any of my devices

I know my phone and location is tracked heavily for advertising and such. If I care to be anonymous I leave phone home and carry cash. Even then there are cameras everywhere.

So i expect this location data likely tracked either way, so might as well go to help the greater good.

Many people don't have smart phones and, like me, many people don't always take their phone with them everywhere they go.

Cause data has never leaked from cloud server storage rented by individuals or companies before… oh, wait… (but trust him, it’s just him and a buddy who have access, what could possibly go wrong).

Seems like all I read about on hacker news is big techs negative effect on society. When did this website become so negative about all this? The google bashing was one thing, but now it’s all surveillance and censorship. Where’s the startup talk? Programming language talk? Open source code?

And for what? Bluetooth does not help to sufficiently trace airflow. It doesn’t recognize walls. The data will be highly unreliable.

Nonetheless, people will be forced to use it because social and work pressure let’s them do so.

Infections will rise again though because people and politicians assume it is safe enough.

So it’s only use is for the Big Brother watching you.

If Apple and Google can’t manage to keep their platform privacy conscious, this may even set an the end to the smartphone era. An old Nokia is waiting in the drawer already.

> “Some people are completely opposed to an intrusion on privacy but there’s a younger generation sharing their location on dozens of apps,” Burgum said.

Funny, when you tell young people that by the time they leave the food court, descend the escalator and exit the mall, 100 companies know what, where and when they bought dinner, they stop using digital payments.

A roundabout solution might be to only allow people out of quarantine if they have an acceptable contact tracing solution so that if they become infected they can notify others - and - others can notify them. Then see how supply and demand work that out ... (although it would, of course, take too long).

If the draft can exist, so can contract-tracing, it's a matter of context and proportionality. Right now the greater good favours contact tracing though probably not after the pandemic dies down.

The C virus is as severe as a severe flu. It makes no sense to turn devices into surveillance devices a little bit / a lot / completely. Google and Apple will also lose trust if they do it.

Edit: The C virus is a deadly disease and the flu is a deadly disease. Google and Apple must be sure that it's useful to have this tracking in this situation. If it was not useful in this situation the 2 companies would lose trust. From [1], which is a good article again and again because it demands decisions based on data:

If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...