Germany flips to Apple-Google approach on smartphone contact tracing
reuters.com
reuters.com
A nice comic version of DP-3T, by Nicky Case, is available here: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/
(But is the Apple-Google protocol identical to DP-3T, or does the headline mention “Apple-Google approach” just for simplicity? I heard there are some minor differences…)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3DZ3St3QRw
Starts at about 1:19.
Edit Gibson is a good explainer, but it's just a video of the two podcasters. It could be much clearer with visual aids.
DP-3T also explains how records are uploaded to a central server and the interactions with health-care providers. Apple-Google omit this part and focus on proximity data collection.
Edit: Formatting + I wrote a survey paper on a few of the distributed protocols and how they defend against linkage attacks (de-anonymization): https://github.com/robertTheHub/ContactTracingSurvey/blob/ma...
Edit: I see now that it's specifically iOS that doesn't provide for granting the required permissions. I find such lack of control over a device that one supposedly owns highly concerning at best.
More generally, how are background streaming services supposed to work on the iPhone? Does Apple have to individually approve every app that wishes to do so (ex Spotify, Pandora, ...)?
In many situations we may not have better solutions, but that doesn‘t change the fact that this is terrible.
I'm having trouble interpreting this in any way other than a claim that granting users control over their devices is a fundamentally broken idea. I won't dispute that users often choose to do dumb things in practice, but it seems the two of us have a fundamental disagreement in our underlying worldviews.
> Even technically competent users ... no matter what you actually write
I'd argue that such users aren't actually technically competent then, despite the high opinion they might have of themselves. On the other hand, perhaps the users are technically competent and it's actually the relevant software developers that have done a poor job of communicating? If an actual technically competent user is experiencing significant difficulties using a program, then perhaps the program doesn't work as well as the developers thought it did.
Government-mandated alternative applications will probably be excepted, too.
"Those privacy principles are not going to change," said Gary Davis, Apple's global director of privacy. "They are fundamental privacy principles that are needed to make this work."
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/24/apple-google-in-a...
I'd like to mention the TCN Protocol here (https://github.com/TCNCoalition/TCN), another very similar specification. I bring it up because the readme goes into quite a bit of (easily understandable!) detail regarding the trust assumptions of such a protocol and associated rationale.
Ultimately I think Apple and Google are right to omit record upload and authentication concerns from the base protocol. The low level implementation should be as interoperable and generalized as possible in order to facilitate immediate uptake and maximum reusability. Higher level concerns such as who to trust and how to interact with users can be handled by the various app implementations.
Could this be a feature rather than a bug here? Help maintain tracing to a very high level statistically while still giving plausible deniability for personal privacy?
Feel free to hit me up henriquez AT protonmail if you'd like to discuss!
It's a good idea to show how it could be privacy "OK" , but doesn't even hint on a reality that this might not be a road we want to go down - paved best intentions and all that.
2. The number of minutes is a threshold decided by epidemiologists, programmed into people's phone, as a public-policy heuristic. It doesn't need to be perfect, just to catch a lot of the actual contacts in its filter while avoiding too many false positives - even quarantining 50 or 60% of contacts can reduce spread by a lot!
3. You could be compelled to release data, but all you would get is a list of beacons; you'd then have to also subpoena/steal everyone else's records of whose beacons they saw (this data stays on local devices!) and correlate encounters with actual locations. This is HARD - like, nation-state actor hard. Like, nation-state intelligence agency hard, probably beyond the reach of your average criminal-justice apparatus.
4. DP3T already has open-source implementations (e.g. https://github.com/DP-3T/dp3t-app-android).
5. If your threat model is "my phone/OS manufacturer will publish code that doesn't follow the protocol", then you're screwed anyway. (And in fact, Apple and Google aren't following this protocol, they're coming out with their own joint system that they claim is DP3T-inspired.)
3. Yea, that’s great and all. The point is that you may compelled to upload your contacts - NOT your beacons. You are collecting people you met. You likely do understand some of the ways contract testing could be abused. Think about police trying to prove contact with someone they do have beacons for.
5. So why bother with passcodes, or any security at all anywhere for any new or existing feature? This is a slight evolution on “I have nothing to hide”.
3. Indeed, they can use this to prove that two people who are both under surveillance/investigation were in the same area as each other. That's a risk, but not as severe of a risk as the general fear I've seen around this protocol.
5. That's my point. If you don't trust your implementer to actually implement the security feature, you're screwed anyway. You have to trust someone, and by using a modern phone you are implicitly trusting Apple and Google. Or at least trusting their employees to make a big stink if lines are crossed.
Not with the "Apple/Google protocol", you can't; your beacons are derived from a key, and only the key is uploaded.
> (And in fact, Apple and Google aren't following this protocol, they're coming out with their own joint system that they claim is DP3T-inspired.)
Criticisms of DP3T should be separated from criticisms of the Apple/Google system.
I attribute this in no small part to their continuous lobbying and sisyphean efforts on the fringes of technology and civil rights.
Thanks!
https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2020/contact-tracing-requireme...
How large the influence of the CCC actually has been is of course uncertain but their comments have played a big part in public discussion of the last days. Most articles that I have read mentioned the criticism. And in German media quoting the CCC is often synonymous with "the nerds who actually understand computer say" (in good but also bad ways).
Anyway, that's essentially what Apple seems to have done here. Strong move, and one they should be rewarded for.
This really only works in certain companies tho. I’ve seen some of our best developers removed from our project because they refused to build features that didn’t make sense. Word just goes up to senior management, and all of the sudden you’re to blame for project delays, and eventually pushed to another project.
Sadly not, although I wish it was. In my current team, developers are only there to agree with POs, and to build whatever they want. Any resistance from a developer is seen as bad. Of course if we build a feature according to POs requirements, and the requirements were wrong, then developers are also blamed, since we should've highlighted this up front.
It's not that I haven an issue with not having a final say in how things are build. If a PO comes with a seemingly unreasonable demand, I've come to understand that that's often the net result of politics and compromises from which developers are shielded. It's something I've come accept as a part of the job and I've even learned a great deal from. But it also implies that in some cases my professional responsibility doesn't extend beyond what I do in my terminal or my IDE.
I do have an issue being treated like a character in a badly organized DnD game. And I have had no qualms in the past making it clear that I don't tolerate being blamed for bad planning or shoddy requirements gathering.
Good PO's are sensible about this and own up to their responsibility. Talking about it works. That's why people skills are just as every bit as important for developers as well. If a team isn't willing to discuss this elephant in the room, then it says a lot about the dynamics, and you have to question whether it's worth your valuable time to work in a context that isn't enjoyable in the first place.
After all, life's too short to deal with other people's drama.
I have found myself in this situation for the past two years, I've voiced my opinion more than once. But at the end of the day, in a non-tech financial company, developers just aren't important enough to be listened too. The business side holds all the powers, managers on the tech side know this, and thus let them treat us like code monkeys. There have been numerous reshuffles in our team to "try and fix the problem", however without accountability, it will be difficult to fix a problem without understanding the root cause.
I've lost all respect for people who operate as the middleman between the development team and the business side, mostly because when it comes down to choosing a side, they'll side with the business, and play their politics game. After all, developers can't get them fired / moved away from a project.
I know I should just walk away, and I've told myself this for over a year. Yet this job is oddly comfortable (in terms of benefits), so I just let it happen. I still have moments where I care enough to speak up, but they're quickly shut down my managers.
I once walked away from a gig that was literally 2 blocks down from my door and traded it in for a gig with a 2 hour commute. Just to guard my sanity.
I think it comes to to cost/benefit and opportunity cost calculations. And those are different for everyone.
Forget where that's from, but seems true of companies too. Each company I've joined had skeletons you'd never see during an interview. After the honeymoon period wears off, the truth starts to show.
Not to say that you shouldn't find a new job. Definitely don't expect it just get better though.
In fact trading the known badness of your current company for something else gives you opportunity to find different ways a company can be dysfunctional. Enough of those experiences and you'll get good at pointing out dragons before they get nasty. Truly valuable for a senior developer.
I think that in software there's something similar. Maybe you'd have more fun in a software company, where what you do is central to the business. Anyway, don't give up hope! There are jobs out there where you'd be having a lot more fun every day.
Don't let this stereotype poison your career. Not everyone is like that, but if you assume they are, they likely will be. Relationships are so key.
I’m sure there’s good ones, and I really hope I get a chance to work with them.
there is the other side as well, PM : build me a bike. Dev: here is a spaceship. PM: but i wanted a bike. Dev: bike make no sense if u can travel using a spaceship.
At the risk of being overly nitpicky (because I understand and agree with the general point you're getting at):
That spaceship _is_ super awesome and far superior to a bike if you need a solution that'll get you a far distance in a short amount of time.
But what if the need is something that's safe, cheap, and doesn't require complicated infrastructure to support? A bike might be a better solution.
Blame the PM if they're not making those priorities and needs clear, though.
Sometimes you know that they ask a bike but will change the specifications later, so you try to prevent the mess.
Trust me, I have a lot of experience in building 3-wheeled space-bikes ;D .
I was asked to write an invoicing system. I know a _lot_ about invoicing systems. The owners who employ me were very explicit: all figures this invoicing system displays must exclude gst/vat. That made sense to them, because gst/vat just confuses their profit figures.
However, the whole point point of an invoice is to communicate to the customer what they will be paying and why. The customers in this case are retail. They are interested in only one figure: what comes out of their bank account. That figure includes gst/vat of course.
As part of this I asked to see what they were doing now. The old system they were using did adhere to their edict: everything was ex gst/vat. As a consequence every person who customer facing (ie, the the vast majority of the employees) carried a calculator to convert the figures to what the customer wanted as they spoke with them. It looked difficult to me, but evidently madly stabbing calculator buttons while maintaining a smooth flow of conversation must be a skill most people can acquire.
This was insanity of course: we could save the bulk of the organisation time and considerable fustraton by just giving these people the figures they needed. So I very explicitly ignored their direct instructions. Note: I had to ignore it, as I had already lost the argument. In due course it was rolled out for testing. I went down a month or two later. The calculators were gone, people were expressing their gratitude. Not a word was said by my managers, and I duly been rewarded every year with raises.
I am an professional. I am hired very explicitly because I know far more about computer systems than the people who hire me. Like a doctor who refuses to prescribe opioid's, I view as my duty to steer them them in the right direction even when they don't want to be steered. If that requires putting my balls on the line and refusing to budge, so be it. They can always fire me if I've made a grave error.
Typically I find the cure for misinformation is more information.
What else would you do if your PM wants you to build backdoors into your encryption, for example?
I'm not sure what this means. Excused by whom? I don't blame governments for wanting this. Stability helps them keep power, even in a democracy. But I applaud those who are willing to push back.
Just build whatever and ignore your PM isn't a recipe for team success.
Thanks for taking my nuanced statement and building that straw man.
Another problem with this standard is its overuse of plosives, which are themselves dangerous when disease is spread by droplets.
I'm off to arrange my birthday arty.
FTFY
Important bit: This will not default to on, you will have to opt in. Apple and Google have a regional kill switch if it is being abused.
https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
I saw a tweet yesterday about having to leave the screen on, but it turns out the source website was updated to remove that line, and that's not how the app works. However, there are also screenshots on Twitter of lock screen notifications saying that the app needs to be open so I don't know any more...
I rather like the solution the Apple/Google have come up with because it solves a more general problem very nicely. The more general problem is "malware" for what of a better word (it's perhaps too harsh) - apps that lie or mislead about what they do and hide what their bluetooth proximity harvesting in the permission thicket (who here would automatically associate the "Fine Location" permission with bluetooth proximity harvesting).
But notice in this particular instance that's not what's happening. There is no attempt to deceive. The app is purely opt-in, and what you are opting into is very explicit. In this particular case there is almost no difference between what Apple/Google propose and TraceTogether. The difference amounts to when you give the government permission to know who you are. For TraceTogether it happens when you install the app. For the Apple/Google proposal, it's when you see your doctor when being notified you are infected. In both cases, no privacy is given up until you are infected, and assuming you installed the app in good faith and do get tested when notified the outcome is the same.
There is the minor problem the Australian government could surreptitiously change the app to something more sinister down the track. I'd be very confident they would not do it now, but 24 months later when attitudes reverted it's sadly entirely plausible. That could be fixed by changing release policies (such as publish source before deploying). But it looks like for whatever reason they won't be doing that, so perhaps Apple/Google forcing them deal with the citizens they govern honestly and transparently is a good thing, despite the delays it causes.
1. There's a fixation on contact tracing without recognition that it's useless without isolation. In-home isolation will infect other occupants. Voluntary isolation doesn't scale. Asian countries doing effective test+trace+isolation already know this. Think of it terms of kill chain F2T2EA: find, fix, track, target, engage, assess. You have to execute the entire loop for effect. The ability to force people quarantine is probably a greater obstacle to liberty depending on local context that needs more discussion.
2. This is going to be EU's Huawei moment. Reliance on US tech for internal policy security that is subject to US political whims is going to cause further exacerbate calls of technological divestment. Who decides when covid19 crisis is over? What if EU want to keep contact tracing in place long term if it's the only ubiquitous system in place for reinstating schengen. I surmise some sort or global digital cordon sanitarie is going to be with us for a while, especially if we want to resume international travel.
E: I'm just suggesting it's worth discussing the system in aggregate rather than piecemeal.
The Oxford paper found that given the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, 60% of people leaving the house would need to use an app like this (not 60% of the whole population).
But that is an evaluation of a single measure: phone contact tracing followed by prompt isolation of contacts. If you combine that with other potential measures such as continued closure of high risk environments, potentially public mask wearing, etc. you might be able to get away with less than 60%.
2 This is not "reliance on US tech for internal policy security", this is using a tool that significant parts of the population have in their pocket to fulfill a complementary task in pandemic management. G&A make it easier to use it for managing the currently ongoing pandemic. "Who decides when covid19 crisis is over?" is pretty straight-forward in Germany, the government with their health ministry and external agencies and in coordination with the EU. G&A provide tools to switch this off on a regional basis. This is far from a "Huawei moment" because the tech side of it is pretty much a side note to history in terms of overall relevance.
2. This article is literally about US tech companies "refuse to budge" on standards a sovereign backed during time of extreme crisis. It may very be that Apple provided a better argument, but the language suggest Germany was rebuffed, that is, it was an unilateral decision on Apple's part. Germany just found out how little influence it has over critical tools to their security. This is arguably much worse than a Huawei moment since Huawei ostensibly has alternate supply chains whereas US companies own the software ecosystem for all mobile devices. The tech side in both scenarios are both going to be historically incidental, but the political ramifications will be long lasting.
Saying who decides covid19 is over is straight forward is like saying US declaring wars are over is straight forward. Maybe theoretically, but in reality not. What if EU wants these features permanent baked in as part of the future biosecurtiy system. What happens if G&A says no.
This is Germany. They are a US satellite state since 1945 and have only limited independence on strategic issues.
(Suppose someone in charge of virus response is totally naive and says the old phrase, "what does anyone have to be worried about losing privacy, in the face of this public health crisis?" Or, "why wouldn't we want to know exactly when and where the transmission happened, to identify some trouble spot and stop it?")
Are we more concerned about one's location every 5 min being revealed? What if coffee shops/bus stations/shopping centers broadcast beacons and essentially became fixed known users -- doesn't that defeat this? And doesn't your phone already reveal location to anyone with sufficient access / authority on cell networks?
Are we more concerned about revealing who you associate with? Again, isn't that already possible through cell locations?
Are we not losing something by giving up recording the location element of the transmission event?
What are some examples of how this technology (if implemented wrong) could be misused, that are not already available?
And here's a related public policy question -- if we think ridiculous the people who are jumping to reopen businesses (and states) at the cost of putting people's lives at risk, why is privacy so important versus saving lives if a more effective (but slightly less private) information gathering mechanism could be implemented?
Government access to private data: revealing location & contacts. I think privacy might be the wrong description, I think it's more about surveillance of the people by the state, which is not acceptable for a huge percentage of people I know. Privacy is most of the time the better wording, but I think surveillance is the better fitting term for this occasion.
Just compare it to the DDR (German democratic republic, the communist state). Is it similar to the surveillance by DDRs Stasi, which tried to track every move and every word of dissidents?
As an additional point: You can't force people to use the app (as far as i know). I don't think this is in any way compatible with basic human rights as formulated by the Grundgesetz (which I support, we are a democracy where the power comes from the people and not an authoritarian regime). They have to opt-in themselves. You have to make the app attractive so that people want to opt-in.
Everything else is a distraction. Either these apps are needed and the above applies, or they are not and let's forget about them.
Yeah, but only when needed, only as much as strictly necessary and deleting it immediately afterwards. I don't think we will allow general surveillance without a fight with a huge part of the population and fundamental changes to our society and our way to live.
Also, I don't agree at all. One right doesn't simply cancel another. And a mandatory app is simply not compatible with our idea of freedom, at least as I understood our basic law. Maybe in certain situation but a general surveillance is illegal.
We won't throw away our (liberal) democracy and the rule of law.
You can't set a target and just simply force the population to comply. I think we can achieve a good penetration without resorting to authoritarian measures. We have achieved some good numbers so far here in Germany, we can use this to further fight the coronavirus without turning into an authoritarian regime. Even our scientists, e.g. Prof. Drosten from the Charite, understand that politics is not science, there are limits what's possible and always stresses that the society itself must decide to act.
Nothing is absolute and a balance has to be struck. Germany is quite controlling in many aspects so it is a little strange that this would be an issue.
If contact tracing is needed then it should be deployed in the most effective way.
This is temporary and does not restrict people's freedoms at all. The controversy is manufactured on ideological grounds at a time when pragmatism should prevail.
Claiming that this would be throwing away democracy or the rule of law is plainly ridiculous. I think Germany is still traumatised by its history and this often has unfortunate consequences (we already saw it several times in recent years).
I, and many others, do not agree with your opinion that it should be mandatory. No other country has mandated contact tracing apps for their non-quarantined population.
There's no proof that a contact tracing application would be effective after there are already millions of cases. There is no indication that there will be enough tests to identify asymptomatic carriers, so if you were vulnerable you'd still need to self-isolate to be safe.
Already 1 out of 5 people have antibodies to this. We're on our way to herd immunity and a death rate of something like 1 out of 500 people. We were trying to slow things down so that hospitals were not overwhelmed, and we've done so. Unless someone comes up with a vaccine that can be mass produced in the next couple months this will all be a moot point.
I wrote that it should be mandatory IF it is needed.
Otherwise it's like saying that lockdown is needed but that it will only be opt-in: it does not make sense.
By the way, no, 1 in 5 people do not have antibodies.
> By the way, no, 1 in 5 people do not have antibodies.
"Cuomo Says 21% of Those Tested in N.Y.C. Had Virus Antibodies", NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
It seems that as we get more data we're find more cases, and in increasing amounts, across the board. Which lowers the death rate and means we can reach herd immunity sooner than we thought.
No, because the list of beacons you received is only stored in your phone, so that would only allow you to determine that you went to a coffee shop often, and no one would be able to get a list of anyone who was close to the coffee shop.
This of course assumes that the app/OS vendor does not include hidden functionality that uploads your received beacons, but in that case they could just activate the GPS and upload the location regardless of the contact tracing system chosen.
The coffee shop would be able to determine how many smartphones are present near its location at any time (although this could be mitigated in principle by having smartphones send many beacons if they are receiving few, so the number is approximately constant), but would not know anything about them, including whether they are the same smartphones that it detected at a different time.
If Germany really needed it, they could take Apple to court.
I am sure Siemens would be horrified it it was turned around and the US govt started demanding they modify their industrial controllers, famously targeted by stuxnet, to allow them to be tracked more easily.
Yes, it actually does. I certainly don't like the idea of such an action being taken in practice, but isn't dictating that certain arbitrary requirements must be met in order to do business within a jurisdiction kind of a large part of the point of having a government in the first place? What's concerning to me about this case is that end users aren't even capable of opting in at present and that due to the time constraints involved Apple would appear to have a distinct advantage.
Note that the previous (somewhat similar) controversy in the US involving Apple was an issue specifically due to questions about constitutionally protected rights and federal government overreach.
Government / company interactions with multinational corporations are simple: the government makes rules, and the company is free to either operate in the locale or quit.
Germany decided that they would rather have an Apple which refused to play by the proposed rules, than no Apple at all, so they figured out new rules.
That makes no sense. Maybe, in theory, if you had five years to play with, Germany could move towards restricting Apple products.
In practice the window of opportunity to affect the course of this epidemic using technology is weeks or months. That restricts your options to using existing infrastructure; realistically that means working with Apple or Google.
Germany could ban Apple and Google products, but that would leave them nothing to work with.
This is going to raise questions about national security and sovereignty going forward. I suspect this will be a subject of controversy after the pandemic dies down.
Time will tell but I feel like reducing this to the technical decision of Apple is slightly one sided. The PEPP-PT proposal was a pseudonymous, centralized, social graph of all users in the app with a rather opaque power structure behind it. The government got pushback from many sides on this issue and several EU neighbours publicly endorsed the decentralized DP3T.
This is a complementary tool for an epidemiological use case that heavily depends on public adoption, while PEPP-PT tried to push this narrative of "Apple vs France/Germany" over the last week through lobbying I do not think it's an accurate/comprehensive depiction of the decision making process in a democratic government.
We won't know why exactly it was abandoned but I would give the CCC more credit than Apple.
I think it makes more sense when the density of contacts is less extreme.
If there is no vaccine, or if the vaccine isn't very good, social-distancing and contact-tracing is the only way to win.
One fifth of the global population doesn't yet have it. Like many people around the world are undoubtedly experiencing, an elderly relative died yesterday from Covid-19 in New York. I doubt she will be the last.
Why is herd immunity not a "way we win"?
edit: Ah, yes, concern about the time to get there. Well, let's hope that happens quicker than expected (has any study not shown this?) because from where I'm sitting it looks like lock down is ending.
Hospice patients, and the hospice workers.
People already in treatment, and the healthcare professionals providing them with care.
People who smoke, have diabetes, a heart condition, or are immune compromised, and so on, and everyone they know.
This has got to be millions and millions of people, and this isolation will be extraordinarily porous. Those folks have friends and family too, they will slip up, exposing their contacts and then the virus is on the other side of a firewall. And we've seen how quickly the virus spreads in isolated groups!
New York has six times the per capita deaths that Sweden does. Just extrapolating and multiplying their current number by 3x6==18, that's about 35000 dead swedes until they get to herd immunity.
I genuinely don't understand the alternative world some people live in where Sweden has already beaten this. They're current curve is about 3 weeks behind most of Europe, largely due to the lack of lockdown that allowed the early outbreak to spread for longer.
This isn't evidence. You're reading spin. The article even tells you that.
I have heard R0 estimated around 4. So, technically you would need 3/4 of the population to be immune. The result of this being that R_t drops below 1 thus no longer becomes an epidemic and eventually either disappears or becomes seasonal.
(we also get the benefits of herd immunity if enough people get an effective vaccine)
I know I sound like a broken record every time I say this on HN... but why no one thinks of pharmacological treatment? The first wave of (small) trials will end this June.
Plus I'm confident that the anti-inflammation drugs being tested can help with lung tissue damage.
It would be great though if one of those studies found an effective drug!
Even if the results are bad, it also depends on what they were used for, since the little evidence we have tells us that the sooner we act, the better.
Example: ritonavir was a letdown, but even in the NEJM paper the limitations of the study mention that the trial was done on people with rather severe sympthoms. At this point it was probably too late to make a dent in the infection.
The data on remedisivir (which came from two suspended trials due to lack of enrollment, so no statistical power) showed an almost-identical mortality between the two groups, but I'd argue that those (at least one of them was) were done on patients in severe conditions, so once again late.
Later trials which are ongoing are hopefully better designed (NIH's for remedisivir at least, Gilead's don't use a placebo IIRC) and will get us answers. IMO, even a small improvement on hospitalization rate would be a huge win for the ICUs.
That said, remedisivir is i.v. so this limits applicability to hospitals.
In other words, not all of those people that had a virus are currently infectious. Only the people that are currently actively infectious are the ones that need to be traced.
I'm hearing such a wide variety of claims about this virus that I have by default become skeptical of anything that makes a wide ranging claim. The descriptions range from "highly infections, potentially causes strokes in otherwise young healthy people" to "highly infectious, young people often display no symptoms at all".
Are there multiple strains of this virus out there in the wild? I don't know of another way to explain what I'm hearing from people that work in virology and in hospitals on the front line.
There's probably a lot of other factors that feed into it - median age, pollution, weather/temperature, potentially genetic/ethnic factors... Even things like the prevalence and use of public transit. It's a lot harder to get/spread the virus in LA where most people drive private cars to everything than in NYC where a lot of people spend an hour or more every day in crowded subway trains/stations.
Working out exactly what contributed to the real-world outcomes we're seeing is something we'll probably only be able to guess at, but nothing I've seen so far feels inexplicable.
Both those things can be true at the same time.
I saw one German doctor (from Charité Berlin I think?) who did over 100 autopsies on TV saying in all cases he had on his table there were preexisting conditions (and the older the more likely you have one or more of those). But he also said that the young and "healthy" people he looked at also had preexisting conditions that usually were never diagnosed before.
This reminded me of a buddy in school, who went for the routine mandatory checkup before the mandatory military service (since been abandoned), a jock-type who seriously considered joining up voluntarily to become a jet fighter pilot, and ended up learning he only had one kidney since birth. Something he never knew or suspected and never had any issue with because he was otherwise young and healthy, but which could come back to bite him when he gets old or when he contracts some serious disease (like this one maybe).
In some sense that is pretty high compared to the baseline, but being equal to 10 years of driving isn't apocalyptic.
One of probably a dozen panel discussions on COVID19 he's hosted so far.
UCSF Experts on the Epidemiology, Science, & Clinical Manifestations of COVID-19, and UCSF Response
But, that's the larger point I think... Next time.
Let's say this ends up being way better than anyone modeled, it's great practice for a virus that actually has a 5%, or 10%, or etc fatality rate.
They're not.
The NY study is the only one measuring a positive rate much higher than the false positive rates of the tests, and it is consistent with about a 1% infection fatality rate.
So thinking the worst is over for sure is wishful thinking; and to just resign to "out of the bag" isn't an option either; the worst is only over if we keep at flattening the curve enough to not collapse the system. There are many different parts to it, and one such part might be contact tracking/tracing with an app.
Also, all the talk about herd immunity etc is based on the premise that you actually get a lasting immunity after you had the virus. While it thankfully looks like this may be the case (exceptions like immunocompromised people, apply) - with e.g. blood plasma from cured patients showing good results when given to still severe cases - it isn't certain yet. It could mutate enough (like the flu) and reinfect, or it could "hide" like herpes and hit you full blown when your immune system isn't operating at full capacity. Let's hope not, but let's act at least with that in mind. Contact tracing technology we develop and roll out now may help should there be a second wave.
And yet another also: there have been reports that even after mild progressions some patients end up with damaged lungs, damage that is most likely be permanent. So while these reports haven't yet been verified or refuted, I am not a big fan of "just get it and get it over with, if you're young and low risk".
Humanity has dealt with double-digit-fatal diseases, several of them, for centuries. SARS2 is an ugly bug, but hardly an existential threat to the species.
While not criticizing you directly, I cringe every time I see this reported in the media, and even some TV scientists are not immune from these statements. It is a novel virus, all right. We know almost nothing about it, all right. But it's not a magical Star Trek-like being which does not fit any biological hypothesis.
Other members of the coronavirus family do not exhibit these properties (hiding like the herpes virus that is), so it is at least unlikely that this will happen. And while it can mutate, it will do so at a much lower rate than influenza, which, due to the structure of its RNA, can have plenty of recombination events which cause far more variation.
A nice non technical explanation: https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine
Either I'm misunderstanding something or it has just been decided that downloading many MBs a day is not a dealbreaker.
You only need to download tokens for people who tested positive in the recent past (14 days - assuming you're not infected, any contact before that couldn't have infected you.)
While that's likely still a lot of data in areas with large daily case counts, at least it won't keep growing indefinitely.
BTW it's one token per day per person, to improve privacy. When someone tests positive, their tokens for the last 14 days are published.
When you first install the app you might have to download all keys from the last 14 days, which would be about 15 MB.
16 -> 8 halves those data figures; diminishing returns from there, but it is possible to reduce the data use further (slightly).
With 20 bits/key such filters yield a false positive rate (FPR) of 0.001%. Meaning for 100,000 new cases per day worldwide, you would only need to download 0.24 MiB.
Note that the FPR applies to each lookup. That is, if you have collected say 100 tokens on a given day, the overall probability of a false positive will be 0.01% (assuming independence). With each extra bit per key you can roughly halve that probability. So in practice size won't be an issue.
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/cuckoo-conext2014.pdf
For people with 200MB & 500MB data caps (which is a surprisingly large number of people), this is a significant amount of their data allowance.
These are likely to be people that are still required to go out into the world and work, so are still using their data instead of wifi, and thus higher risk.
It's easy to forget when you're on 10GB+ data plans for years just how many people are not.
The other issue is that contact tracing (decentralized or not) is exploitable. In Korea, people sometime figured out who is infected or not, and those people are now socially bashed on the internet.
There are many scenarios where contact tracing can be abused : for example, anyone from outside your house can now know if there is someone inside. Handy for thieves.
French academics did set up a nice website with a list of those scenarios, but it's only available in French : https://risques-tracage.fr/
The actual debate is not decentralized/centralized, it's "should we allow contact tracing or ban it?"
Did you mean "digital contact tracing" there? Contact tracing itself is a necessary tool when dealing with a pandemic and I really do not see anybody arguing against that. Of course there's a lot of trade-offs and questions like voluntary/mandatory, usage restrictions, etc. but I feel like decentralized vs. centralized debate was a good first discussion to have in a democracy.
Humanity got right we are today (still alive and growing) without digital contact tracing. So, no, this is not a "necessary" tool.
I wish the link I posted above was available in English too, because they analyzed a few scenario that shows how digital contact tracing can be exploited by anyone, not just techies people.
I would rather be a partisan of investing our money in technologies that heal and strengthen our bodies. At least regenerating and healing the body could help with many other diseases.
He said "contact tracing" is necessary.
fraction stoppped = (usage fraction in population)2 * (fraction of infections recorded as contacts) * (fraction of detected contacts who follow up correctly)
That's obviously a massive over simplification; for example real population dynamics don't give full random mixing between all members of the population. But every factor there is potentially depressed because of opt in and anomnymity; the first obviously so, the third because people are less likely to followup correctly if there's no consequence for not doing so, and the second because it will be impossible to tune the detection parameters without any data to work from. In that — again oversimplified — model if you get 50% o the population using the app (compared to 80% smartphone usage in western Europe), it detects 80% of transmissions and (say) 50% of people follow up correctly before themselves passing the disease on, you end up with 10% of infection chains traced. That doesn't seem like it's going to have a big impact.
So assuming that model's not wildly wrong — which it could be, again, I'm really looking for a link to an expert discussion of this, I can see a few possibilities: * Digitial contract tracing doesn't have much impact on our ability to control the virus * Governments seek to outsource the privacy-invasion needed to companies by e.g. requiring evidence that people are using the contact tracing software and have followed up on potential transmission events before allowing people to buy food etc. * Ineffective opt-in contact tracing and a second wave of pandemic deaths/lockdown is used to bounce people into accepting the need for mandatory, non-anonymous contact tracing with fewer privacy concessions than you'd get right now.
To be clear I'm very concerned with the idea of govenments and in particular the current UK government having access to non-anonymised contact data; it's already being run by someone who considers population-level manipulation using data science and social media to be his core skillset. But I'd also like to understand what tradeoffs are being made in terms of disease control.
- The proposed centralized solution would have to rely on malice to easily identify people that did not follow up correctly since there was no means to do that in it. The only upside you would have had was more trivial means for data collection on population scale to validate random epidemiological models and validate follow up.
- 50% of people failing to follow up correctly seems like an unreasonably low number given that it's not that different from breaking quarantine with the existing process and there's few enough cases of that to still garner high profile media attention here.
- Even if 50% wrong behaviour was a correct assumption, that would be a slippery slope in most models. If you lose, say, 10% of the overall population because it's allergic to the historical and privacy implications of the system design, misbehaviour of 50% of people left using it can be pretty irrelevant.
- AFAIR adoption in Singapore, which is often used as a reason to use this model in the first place, so far has not been anywhere close to the 50% of 80% of phone users. Many people seem to suggest looking at WhatsApps growth rates for realistic adoption time frames.
Fraser et al have a few general articles and calculated through scenarios on the matter that might be interesting, maybe you get something out of those:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie...
https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/files/files/report-effective-app...
Many discussions w.r.t. the epidemiological impact of these trade-offs at the moment seem anecdotal because they lack proper validation. I do not think any of them so far directly address the one you are looking at here.
My assumption was that if the R0 is 3-5, that's small compared to the total number of contacts over the infectious period. That means that the false positive rate is going to be rather high. Given a high false positive rate and some inconvenience with following up, needing to go get tested or go into isolation, either of which mean taking time off work at short notice, people will "take a chance" more often than you'd like and delay getting tested until there are symptoms. But certainly it's not a confident estimtate.
Also, Germany is likely cultrally different, but opt-in social distancing / lockdown lasted fully 3 days in the UK before it became clear that it wasn't going to have the necessary effecity. I can imagine the same thing for compliance with contact tracing recommendations.
> The proposed centralized solution would have to rely on malice to easily identify people that did not follow up correctly since there was no means to do that in it
Right, but this is (aiui) different to the systems in countries like South Korea which use location tracking to ensure that you don't break quarantine. It's a point in the possibility space that must be considered to understand tradeoffs.
> AFAIR adoption in Singapore, which is often used as a reason to use this model in the first place, so far has not been anywhere close to the 50% of 80% of phone users. Many people seem to suggest looking at WhatsApps growth rates for realistic adoption time frames.
You'd hope a massive public information campaign could speed up uptake here. I think I've heard that whatsapp is on 75% of devices in Germany (but I haven't verified that number) which if you assume 80% of the population owning a smartphone, leads to 60% of the population opting in. So that doesn't change the results of the toy model too much (if it was 75% of the population rather than 75% of smartphone owners, that would roughly double the fraction of infection chains terminated compared to the 50% assumption).
These numbers still seem pretty low to me, but again I've got precisely zero expertise here.
> Fraser et al have a few general articles and calculated through scenarios on the matter that might be interesting, maybe you get something out of those
Thanks! I'll read those.
> Many discussions w.r.t. the epidemiological impact of these trade-offs at the moment seem anecdotal because they lack proper validation.
That's worrying. I think there's a possibility here that we're in the zone where privacy-preserving contact tracing has too low effacity to be significant in saving lives, but solutions that are mandatory and come with enforcement are effective. If that turns out to be true, there's a clear tradeoff between individual privacy and saving lives / rescuing countries from economic ruin. If I were the sort of person who wanted to significantly change the narrative around privacy to make it look unacceptably selfish, this might be the sort of crisis I'd see as an oppertunity. And given that this is less information than Google and Apple can access as a mattter of course, constructing the narrative that it should be shared with the health service is easy, if people go that way.
I hope there are people thinking about the case where there's popular support for the tracking being mandatory and non-anonymous, so that there can be proper legal — rather than technical — safeguards to ensure the data is only used for its intended purpose and is destroyed promptly when it's no longer useful for that purpose. The optimistic point of view is that this process will give us the ability to shape the fuure of privacy regulation so that we accept that some entities (Google, Facebook, maybe the Government) have more personal data than we're confortable with, but there are stronger controls on how long that data can last and what it can be used for.
Citation?
On March 16th there was a request to avoid "non-essential travel and contact with others", on March 20th pubs and resturants were forcibly closed, and by 23rd the restrictions on movement were being put into law.
The three-day period I was thinking of was the 20th-23rd; the number of people out and about on the weekend of 21st/22nd was widely reported as the reason for the stricter rules the following Monday e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/boris-johnson-...
If, however, you mean "what's the proof that people were ignoring the pre-lockdown restrictions in sufficient numbers to make the stricter provisions necessary", all I can do is point out that the people with the best access to that data did chose to require the stricter provisions in response to what they saw. For more you're going to have to wait for the inevitable public enquiry (and I am deeply deeply uninterested in having a discussion about whether lockdowns are the only or most effective policy here).
is that a thing/word?
This is pretty much what I was looking for, thanks. So in their model you need 80% of smartphone users (56% of the population) to opt in to the contact tracing for it to be effective. But iiuc they also assume what — to me — looks like a really high compliance rate; it assumes that people self-isolate for up to two weeks with 2% daily drop-out rate. That seems fine for people with trivial WFH jobs, or those in industries with good job protections, but pretty unlikely for people whose choice is between ignoring the guidelines and losing their income. I imagine with the excuse of "the whole country is in lockdown" gone, employers will be less tolerant of absence, even if — as in the models — it can be a significant fraction of the country in self-isolation at any time.
I would expect that any custom solution would be implemented by one of the few contractors experienced in dealing with the local bureaucracy, and would thus suffer from a lack of experience in dealing with Bluetooth and all the undocumented quirks.
I wonder if that played into the decision.
This is bullshit plain and simple.
This is a political decision.
Governments contain no shortage of people interested in personal glory
For example this https://silent-pocket.com/
Section 4, "How will the system protect user privacy and security?", bullet one:
> Each user will have to make an explicit choice to turn on the technology. It can also be turned off by the user at any time.
> Can I turn it off? Yes. The choice to use this technology rests with the user, and he or she can turn it off at any time by uninstalling the contact tracing application or turning off exposure notification in Settings.
(And I would certainly expect that Apple and Google are capable of generating the underlying keys in a cryptographically secure manner.)
Oh, wow! So that's like 128 / 8 => 16 bytes? As in 16 ASCII characters? And what crypto has to do with them anyway in this context? Do explain please, I'd love to hear that. And also tell me about those primitives as well, I really need to hear their names.
If dang didn't warned me already not to feed the trolls in the past I'd say that you're full of "you know what", but since he did I'll just stop here
(https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...)
I rarely take my phone with me when I'm out and about and this has been the norm with me for years. I wonder how long it will be before I'm stopped in the street by police who'll ask me to present my phone for compliance inspection and when I report that I don't have it with me then I'll be fined.
To avoid tracking, some people I know take a different approach which is to turn Airplane Mode on until they actually want to make a call. I wonder how long it will be before Airplane Mode in phones is disabled by mandate.
I can foresee a time in the not-too-distant future when someone who doesn't want to own or use a phone will actually be mandated to do so by law. When that time arrives then we'll know that...
..."We've won victory over ourselves. We will have learned to love Big Brother."
Carry your phone in a container made out of conductive material and while the phone is in it you won't be tracked by it.
Of course, all bets are off when you take it out.
Even simpler solution: turn off your phone and maybe take out your phone's battery (if you're lucky enough to have a phone with a removable battery) when not using it.
If your threat model is a tyrannical government, what's preventing them from making it an offense to not carry a phone or otherwise interfere with the contact tracing system?
I'm not sure why these seemingly nearly perfect Faraday containers can be that leaky but they can be—often to the extent that the phone is able to 'dial home' to the tower. Also keep in mind that tin oxides can be both conductive and semi-conducting, which means that intermodulation is likely to occur around the edges of the lid (remember, tin oxide is unusual in that it is both conductive and essentially transparent which counts for why it's used as electrodes in vidicon and image orthicon camera tubes). Perhaps the problem was that if any oxide was present then it was unlikely to be visible (but solving that matter is for another time).
Anyway, I didn't research the problem in depth—as it was more a nuisance than a curiosity. A short while ago I spent a considerable amount of time rooting various Android phones and I didn't want them to call home before I'd finished (as I couldn't get a completely clean install) and it turned out that the leakage problem was significant—and a damn nuisance. To solve the problem with several of the phones, I resorted to opening them up and shorting out the IC pins that lead to the antenna.
As you mentioned, there's another problem with carrying a switched-on phone around in a Faraday cage and that's gaining physical access to the phone before it connects to the cell tower. For example, you may want to switch it to Airplane mode before any connection with the cell tower is established but essentially it's impractical to attempt it unless you are also completely within another much larger Faraday cage.
The fact that these days most phones have non-removable batteries is a first-class damn nuisance to say the least. I have some cheapie phones I use for testing and they have removable batteries and that's invaluable but it's not so with the high performance ones.
In this regard, the best phones I've ever owned were the old Nokia ones that used the three different sizes of detachable batteries (small, medium and large). One could remove the battery in an instant by just pushing the button on the back of the battery nudging slightly until its contacts parted with the phone. This instant detach feature was especially useful if say you were in a meeting and had forgotten to silence your phone—the instant it rang you'd reach into your pocket and voilà the battery and phone had parted company.
What's so annoying these days is that manufactures don't consider such features as important (or more likely they consider them undesirable as during a disconnection you'd likely lose some of that spy data that Google so eagerly collects (now we can't have that happen can we?).
The phones in question are not Apple’s phones. Those phones, and their settings, belong to the end user. They paid for them.
Of course users willingly made the choice to purchase such a device in the first place, though I'm not at all convinced that most understood the tradeoffs they were making. To say that my feelings about the current situation are conflicted would be an understatement.
Shutting down every Apple office in the EU seems like a pretty good idea, oh and confiscating all Apple products, designs and patents..... Look, let's be positive and assume that the reason Germany backed down is because actually Apple's approach is better and they were convined by the explanations of why a centralised approach is wrong. Becuase the other explanation - that European countries are scared of Apple doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
It seems mentioning Apple in this regard is more used to not completely lose the face for the German government and the Helmholtz Institute that favored and developed the centralized version over the decentralized one. Please don't fall victim and paint Apple & Google as the bad boys here. It would be a horrible idea to force them by governments to implement a centralized protocol.
Silicon Valley is a useful boogeyman, in part because they have done some things on the negative side of the evil ledger. Historically governments dwarf private companies in the amount of damage and misuse they Can unleash — with a few notable exceptions where they almost reach the scale of what tyrannical or incompetent governments can wrought.