Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system
reuters.com
reuters.com
Note: All opinions (in this comment and all of mine on HN) are my own.
Convenience always wins.
The only way to fix that would be to use this new API on iOS.
"The Government will work with Google and Apple to investigate whether the new functionality announced by Google and Apple partnership is beneficial for the app performance"
According to the Australian COVIDSafe app's privacy policy, when you register for the app, after you successfully enter a PIN sent by SMS, it transmits the following info to the Australian authorities: your mobile phone number, the name you enter, the age range you enter, the postcode you enter. The reasons for each are explained in the policy. This data is stored in the cloud. I don't see why the registration info (I'm just talking about the registration info, not the Blutooth-related data) can't simply be entered later, or stored locally on the device and not uploaded until, when and if, the user volunteers to share their registration info with health authorities, e.g. as a result of being notified that someone that was near them has tested positive for COVID-19. If this info wasn't transmitted as part of setting up the app, I expect the uptake of the Australian COVIDSafe app would be significantly higher.
I am also still waiting for Australia to publish the source code for their COVIDSafe app...
A lot of voices have spoken out about this issue overseas (particularly in the US) while many local tech voices have skipped considering this at all.
See:
* Previous FTC CTO / Obama Whitehouse senior adviser: https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/1248659875669798912
* Brookings Institute article: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/inaccurate-and-insecure...
* Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University (pdf report): https://healthpolicy.duke.edu/sites/default/files/atoms/file...
* Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-1...
A determination around being a close contact results in 14-day isolation regardless of symptoms, presumably because you may initially test negative before moving into an infectious and asymptomatic or symptomatic phase.
https://blog.gds-gov.tech/automated-contact-tracing-is-not-a...
One recent data point using the CovidSafe app is here: https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1256199078314078210
Exploration around the defects in that app is ongoing here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u5a5ersKBH6eG362atALrzuX...
When you consider that close contacts include anyone you've spent more than 2 hours with in a room, it becomes clear that most life situations are not handled by estimates of proximity using bluetooth: home, family & friend visits, workplaces.
You can find a deep-dive into these issues here:
https://blog.crushthecurve.today/why-should-you-install-the-...
From what I recall, the US was/is spying on the major tech companies and would regularly demand data and place gag orders on those companies.
Neither actions are willful forms of data transfer. The first is actually an eternal game of cat and mouse. NSA finds a leak for some data, Google fixes it, new leak, etc. The second is targeted handover of data, and only affects a few individuals.
Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading. If you think otherwise, please provide more detail.
So you agree.
> Neither actions are willful forms of data transfer.
What’s that got to do with it?
> Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading.
If the data exists, the only prudent approach is to assume state-level actors, at least, can get access to it.
Even nation state actors will have a harder time gathering data that only exists locally on a bunch of smartphones, separate from geolocation as proposed here, versus a centralised database lacking comprehensive oversight.
The rest is pretty irrelevant, we're talking about data collection using phones that already have an OS from both of these vendors. "But Snowden" is really no argument anybody in these discussions will listen to (and I'm not convinced they should if it's used in a way to imply that you shouldn't use the internet for anything). If you have a problem with data collection for contact tracing please be specific why and optimally provide what you feel would be a better alternative.
By everyone you mean "US citizens" because from my understanding non-US citizens are fair game and it it legal to spy on them.
Google has effectively been using Bluetooth scanning and contact tracing (of sorts) as part of their location tracking feature... Now they're turning around and saying they won't track location from Bluetooth scanning? Seems like a BS PR move.
Google lets you do a lot more privacy violation on Android, but Apple has been building their brand around privacy and wouldn’t participate in that.
It's not correct that the US govt has root access to all systems and data.
The only (in)tangible difference between 2005 and today is the presumed existence of national security letters and other warrants that compel these companies to provide access.
If this was exposed once it’s happening elsewhere.
There was also the case of the NIST elliptic curve encryption best practices being subverted for NSA backdoors standard.
They’ve got a job to do. They’re doing it. But worth noting that a vendor could claim be pro privacy while also cooperating with their government.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/tech/israel-coronavirus-techn...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tech-company-says-it-c...
Don't be naïve. This is not an NGO or an institution. They are doing this so that they and noone else owns the data.
Even if this "do your research" level talking point would be true, they don't own the data in this proposal, the end user device does. The device you trust and use anyway, the device that has your geolocation and access to far more data Gapple could abuse at all times. Which is better than what the COVIDsafe/NHSX/ROBERT put forward for the specific topic of digital contact tracing.
They have a long way to go in my case but every journey starts with a single step, and this seems like the twelfth or so step from Googles side towards becoming trustworthy (but they still have a long way to go!)
I think one shouldn't underestimate the business value of actually being a trustworthy vendor/business partner/SaaS company and while there are a few contenders that niche isn't too crowded for now :-)
This is why you want an API that never uses any data you don't want anyone else to have. That's what this API is.
The "trust" here isn't about whether they'll keep your data safe from third parties including state level actors. Your "trust" only needs to be that the API does what it says on the tin.
Which leads to this conclusion: either you A) trust this API to be what it says: something that doesn't ever deal with any sensitive data. Basically an exchange of random numbers.
Or B) you think that there is something nefarious here and the API might associate who you are or where you are, and store or distribute that data.
If it's A) then you should be fine. If you think B) then you shouldn't use a phone from Apple or Google. Because as far as you are aware, they share your location and personal information.
As far as integrity goes, I can't see a situation where you would both accept running an iOS or Android phone but at the same time avoid apps with this API out of privacy concerns!
Because you have another choice...
The other side is trusting the government to keep it's promises. During this covid-19 crisis I do trust them, but in the longer term their record of keeping promises has been less than stellar. Frankly, keeping this app or any app of theirs installed over a few years on the basis them promising not to missuse the data is downright foolish given their past history. Such promises tend to become null and void at the next election.
But right now we have no choice - it's either take them at their word, or don't install the app. Yes, we can do what the gang of four above have done and de-compile it, but that takes a huge amount of effort that has to be repeated every new release. That effort isn't going to continue. If it doesn't continue the light doesn't continue to shine on it's technical deficiencies, and so they won't be fixed.
But - that can change with a few simple and cheap changes to the way the government does things. All they have to do is release the source to a public repository before they release the binary and have a reproducible build. Do that lots of things become much easier. Checking what the commented source does as opposed decompiled output is much easier, checking just the differences in source between one version and the next is much, much easier than checking the entire thing, using reproducible build to allow you to check the source rather than decompiled output is very much easier. Do that, and the light on the technical deficiencies will stay on forever.
Implementing those inexpensive and straightforward things has anther wonderful emergent properties aside from the technical deficiencies being fixed: you suddenly don't have to trust the government, you can trust the code instead.
But no one seems to focus on changes to the overall process. Instead it's essentially nit picking on how the app does things today. It's an unfortunate focus.
And yes, I'm sure all the telecoms, hospitals, etc. also hand over our data. Adding one more, much more comprehensive data source to the pile doesn't help anything.
In the case of privacy, the trust was broken by the institutions themselves (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, US gov obviously as well). Public privacy was eroded as a result.
Good. That took almost 10 millenia of human development to achieve. Let's not regress.
I believe your claim is false.
That would be true even if Apple suddenly decided "oh these folks on HN want to see the code for that tracing component, better open source our complete OS". I've seen assurances that parts of this will be open sourced as far as they can but I honestly don't see how that matters. You have, as is a general tradition, a description of what this system does cryptographically. The rest is a matter of reverse engineering that hardly benefits from having the code. It's not like Play store updates or whatever Apple uses to push this are reproducible builds the end user can verify. And you always have the closed source blob of whatever BTLE chipset your device uses which you can mistrust.
edit: Let me qualify "but I honestly don't see how that matters" for the question of trust in what runs on your phone here. If you read a dig at OSS into this you're generalizing far over what I'm addressing here.
I have compiled some of the apps on my phone myself so I know that the result does in fact come from the same source code. That may not work in the case of iOS devices, though.
> And you always have the closed source blob of whatever BTLE chipset your device uses which you can mistrust.
That is a good point and it'd be great if that chipset could also be open sourced but one step at a time.
> That would be true even if Apple suddenly decided "oh these folks on HN want to see the code for that tracing component, better open source our complete OS".
You are correct if it was simply open sourcing the OS. If it was possible to compile and install the OS ourselves, that would completely change the game.
Instead, they form an opinion based on generic distrust for apple and Google, just like no-vax people do it out of generic mistrust for institutions and big pharma.
The distrust _is_ justified, and we should be wary. What is not justified is dismissing the CTF based only on that, imo.
You frame that like society itself or the people that make up society are somehow at fault. Perhaps the issue is that elements of society like Apple have taken actions or have failed to take actions which would have engendered the sort of reaction that you would prefer to see.
If Apple wants my trust they need to earn it.
Why should I give Apple my trust again after being burned by them repeatedly?
Does Apple even trust me?
You can understand the skepticism and yet equate the skeptical people to "anti-vax" movement? That's very sneaky of you.
Actually, with the exception of people working on standards committees, I think your comment may be the first time I've ever seen an Apple employee openly comment in a public forum.
Most of the open-source contributors in my projects that get hit by a bus, get hit by an Apple's bus (they start working at Apple, and cannot say anything publicly anymore or contribute to any project).
In other words, you trust Facebook, Google, NSA, and Congress more than Apple?
Seems like an odd standard.
That is: I'm not saying a company is trustworthy if-and-only-if its employees speak publicly. I'm saying that my mental model of what a company would or wouldn't do internally is strongly influenced by what I know about its employees.
But that is irrelevant.
1. Neither Google nor Apple deserve the trust this requires. Seriously!
2. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are arguably pushing tons of resources which will directly harm all current and future human societies. It is not what this precedent will do for us during this epidemic, but afterwards. Also, normalizing tracking is not self fulfilling for Google and Apple, not at all...
Thanks for all you hard work?
- Benjamin Franklin
I wish people really tried to understand rather than just give knee-jerk negative responses to go along with their existing world view.
A lot of people are trying to do the right thing and working hard to do good. The cynical HN default response just feels like a lazy way to try and signal intelligence.
Apple and Google may have good intentions. But if there is one thing clear from history is that if anything can be abused it will be. Maybe not now but it certainly will eventually.
Most of the comments are empty of any actual content from people who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on.
The protocol is designed by people aware and concerned about these risks (which is why the way it works is pretty interesting).
A lot of interesting work happens in the challenging areas where it’s critical to get things right, there are real risks, and the answers aren’t obvious. Engaging in those areas where things are complex is important.
It's easy to just remove yourself from the problem, say something can't be trusted, and then feel good about your moral purity, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. It does, and there is real value in putting work in to solve it.
If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it exactly because you're concerned about the risks.
Jeff Hammerbacher's quote from working at Facebook reminds me of this, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” I think he's right, and working on these bigger non-ad software problems is where the effort should be, because they are hard, and because the outcome is important.
The governments of the west need to be capable, but still protect the privacy of their people - that isn't an easy problem.
You're right, it's a hard problem. And until these companies or institutions can prove that they are doing this, why should we trust them?
>who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on.
The companies will collect and store the tracking data, and the government will, one way or another, have access to it. What is so difficult to understand about that?
"It will only be used for good" is laughably naive, as history had demonstrated repeatedly.
>If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it
Protesting and making your opinions known is way to help solve the problem.
It's difficult to understand because it's false (and this statement shows you haven't tried to understand the solution they are proposing): The data doesn't leave the phone without the user's consent, the consent is only asked for if the user contracts the disease, and the data uploaded when consent is given is only useful to those who have been in the vicinity of that user: the companies developing the system and the government do not get a list of users and their contacts (they get no data at all from anyone who does not consent, and they still don't get contact data from those who do).
The only issue of trust is whether the implementation on the phones matches their statements: but this is already a general problem with phones in general: if you are trusting them to run the OS you are already trusting they will not exfiltrate this and more data. I see no actual expansion in their powers through adopting this approach, and I see them making every effort to protect privacy while achieving the requirements, which is in stark constract to government approaches.
> Protesting and making your opinions known is way to help solve the problem.
Not when the protesting and opinions are based on a false understanding that comes from motivated reasoning, knee-jerk negative responses, and not trying to understand the issue deeply.
Then it’s just noise that confuses the issue and makes things worse.
Most of the time it’s not helping to solve the real problem anyway. It just makes people feel good about themselves without actually engaging in the work.
iOS is full of dark patterns and a few absolutely awful restrictions that are very anti user. It shouldn’t be surprising that the users don’t trust Apple.
(Hopefully this doesn’t come across as disrespectful, I think the work you guys have done on contact tracing is awesome.)
You don't work for the kind of employer that values someone sticking their head out and saying ... anything. They want to control the message, and saying anything may be worse for both you, and for Apple, than saying nothing.
Just be careful. Apple's got the people to manage this PR situation.
That comment seems completely neutral. Not being able to post that comment without worrying about consequences sounds absolutely dystopian.
Secondly, everyone that understands low powered radio wave signals and keeps abrest of covid-19 infection vectors can plainly see that any correlation between those two are going to be extremely weak at best, and extremely easy to game.
No vaxine with such poor results would be allowed on the market, let alone prescribed.
This is a bad case of tech utopist solutioning gone awry.
Given past track record of both companies, this is the only way I would ever have of not being skeptical.
The spec seems pretty clear - it's not possible. If you feel that you don't trust them to implement the spec correctly due to incompetence or malice on their part - you need to supply the proof. If we're relying on your gut feel to be skeptical, you just look like an anti-vaxxer saying "I don't trust Big Pharma's vaccines based on my gut feel."
Even against their will, companies with capabilities can and have been compelled by government agencies to go against their promises and lie about it.
Additionally, with organizations of this size, it's very plausible that the vast majority of employees and even executives are blissfully unaware of wrongdoings, abuse and involvement in conspiracy by individual employees or decision makers.
All it takes is a single compromised or malicious person to add new capabilities in an update to an already rolled-out and well-intentioned software. Possibly a handful if you add strongly enforced and audited mechanisms for co-signing releases and whatnot.
You're making vague, unsubstantiated claims about how this could be compromised. Even if there is a bug that allows such apps to collect location info, that has nothing to do with Snowden leaks.
If a government is keen on collecting such information, they would simply not use Google/Apple's APIs and instead roll their own using bluetooth and location services. This was pointed out in the article. Now could you explain to us why you're promoting a conspiracy theory that the government will lean on Apple and Google to introduce malicious bugs into their APIs when they don't need the APIs at all?
Still, there are multiple plausible ways in which these apps and systems can be compromised by malicious actors (from any nationality). The risks are significantly larger than they need to, to a large degree due to lack of transparency and verifiability, and significant trust elements.
These risks are not inherent in the design of the contact-tracing system or the specific companies themselves, but they are inherent in the way smartphone apps are typically developed and distributed to end-users on mainstream platforms today.
Then on top of that, past and ongoing incidents obliterates my personal confidence that large U.S. tech companies will live up to their promises.
I agree I'd trust Google over the government and many others. But the OP you are replying to called for releasing the source code, and reproducible builds. If you do that, you don't have to trust somebodies word or the laws of the land, you have the laws of mathematics in your court.
Surely you are not saying what is a clearly inferior solution is one we should be using.
The New York Times is neither of those, yet many people would characterize it, alongside the Fourth Estate, as institutions. The term "institution" codes depth beyond legal form [1].
Honestly what is with this attitude? Yeah, I get it.. you took a business class and learned that everything a company does should be to maximize shareholder value.
But welcome to the real world. Sure the company wants to make money, but they also want to provide a valuable service. Yeah sometimes making money gets in the way with the best product they could offer.
But it's people making the decisions of what to make. It's people who use the software (let's say osx/ios) that want to make it better. It's developers who sit there are think how can they improve this feature so it's great for people.
If the government doesnt misuse your data, Apple will, by proxy, buy training there AIs on your datas. Sure the AIs will start out "for the purpose of good" but at some point they will be leveraged for the "purpose of profit".
and its much easier to make something fail than it is to succeed, which is why voting for (and keeping) the right people is so importamt
I have worked with people who "designed" terrible systems or couldn't see that a system would never work, yet still attempted to operate it. It was like they were unaware of the dysfunctional state of it, yet it had to exist because their job was to "design".
One should never unequivocally trust for-profit companies.
There are many parallels between them. Companies run on economic power, government run on political (and also economic and hard) power. Companies are kept at bay by market forces, government by democratic process. Both of them may work or fail (monopolies in market, different kinds of identity politics in democratic process). Both companies and government can do extraordinary good (when incentives are well aligned and leaders are competent) and extraordinary bad (when either is not true). Both can empower petty tyrants inside their hierarchies. The reasonable way is to keep both dependent on each other and to limit each to their own domain.
Defining "essentially the same" sounds hard, especially if a series of "small" changes happen over a period of time. Ship of Theseus, anyone?
As soon as you try defining "small changes" and the period of time on which they can occur, it is arguably a problem that will lead to loopholes easily abused by the legal departments of any big corp.
That's the problem being discussed--the fond relationships are built with entities that no longer exist, and it is argued that current brand practices are deceiving for the consumer side of the relationship and abusive on the producer side.
I am merely saying that if it is possible at a national level, it is possible at a company level. If it is a culture where you work you can quickly become swept along with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard suggests otherwise.
People can't keep crazy conspiracies secret very well, but are completely capable of keeping eroding standards quiet.
that's wildly wrong hypothesis. the complete opposite of these ideas are uncontested knowledge in academia, and in popular culture as well.
see Hannah Arendt's work. (which doesn't even include profit and personal gains!)
If Apple relied on private info for revenue, the warm smile would be the same but the wording would be very different.
Still, the problem is more along the axis of technology. Even if Apple open-sourced their entire stack, we'd still have to take their word for what was running on our phones at any given moment. Encryption protects us but also ensures we can't know what information is sent from our phones to Apple. Hardware security, which protects us as well, turns our phones into a black box.
Are Apple good guys? Well, we could have a whistleblower come forward with evidence that they're not but a lack of whistleblowers isn't evidence that they are. If the entire stack isn't auditable by 3rd parties then we're just going on faith.
Personally, I'm ok with it. I like the aesthetics of Apple products more than their rivals. The threat to me, if it exists, isn't large enough for me to worry about.
If I were a criminal, I wouldn't trust my iPhone for a second.
It is, actually. It reduces the number of possible worlds in which Apple is an evil company, while leaving intact the number of possible worlds in which it is saintly.
It's only weak evidence, to be sure.
I couldn't agree more. But at the same time, I'm completely baffled that while this sentiment about companies is widely agreed upon on HN, people around here don't expand this from companies to much more powerful and dangerous orgs: governments.
Well put. Corporations aren’t people no matter what Citizens United “says.” Their goal is maximizing shareholder profit at any cost. They do nothing out of the goodness of the hearts they don’t have and they certainly are not guided by ethics the way individuals are.
As you said, if Apple “cares” about privacy more than Google or Facebook it is not because it is a more “moral” or “just” company, it is simply because its business model is not, and never was, based on hoovering up and monetizing personal data.
It’s not like a conscious decision was made by Tim Cook or Apple’s shareholders to do things differently than the aforementioned two companies.
Pointing out how Apple “cares about your privacy” is simply a PR (read: propaganda) move designed to gain some extra positive publicity which, of course, helps the bottom line. It’s the kind of thing companies do all the time. Taking these pronouncements at face value requires a certain naïveté (or a wilful suspension of disbelief).
And while Apple might not traffic in its customers’ personal data, the company recently revealed that it scans content stored on its servers, e.g. your iCloud Photo Library, because of “concerns” over child pornography.
This suggests privacy isn’t quite as sacred to Apple as its PR department would have one believe.
(Never mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that mass surveillance reduces incidence of child sexual abuse or decreases the production and distribution of child porn. Which begs the question, why <i>is</i> Apple spying on its paying customers’ personal content?)
Whenever a company, or a government, deploys the cliché “think about the children!” argument as a pretext for increasing internet surveillance, you can bet this reason was chosen because if anyone objects on privacy grounds they can say, “what, so you’re on the side of the child pornographers/suicide trolls/cyber bullies?” It’s a discussion stopping tactic.
Yeah, corporations are definitely not people, they are not your friends and they do not care about you as a person. That in 2020 this even needs to be said is a testament to how thoroughly corporate propaganda has been woven into the fabric of western culture.
https://apple.com/privacy (45 second read)
https://apple.com/privacy/features (many minute read with links to whitepapers)
I believe this goes well beyond following instinct, and at least for me does lead to a strong semblance of trust.
They really did a doozy by not being upfront about Siri's contractors (I already knew so it didn't affect me personally), and they're hemming on E2E iCloud backups (perhaps for Availability, perhaps for China), but they continue to push the envelope on what usable security and usable privacy looks like.
In addition; the iPhone 5s from 2013 is still getting security patches, as recently as March 24th.
I'd go the reverse. The bigger they are, the more I trust them.
> I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way.
But anybody who trusts them for that reason is indeed crazy.
Maybe out definition of trust is different. For me trust means predictability. Do I trust the sun will rise in the east or a stone will roll down the hill? Do I trust my mother will tell me off if I growl at my sister? Do I trust my father will ask me how the finances are going? These things are all predictable - so I trust them. To a lesser extent do I trust these people to keep their word? The answer is sometimes - if my mother promises to look after the kids then definitely, but if she promises not to buy them presents then I'll trust her a little less.
Companies are also predictable in some ways. Bigger companies more so than smaller ones, simply because it takes a lot longer to change the direction of a bigger ship. In my book predictable means trustworthy.
One of the things you can absolutely have faith in is a bigger company is driven by money. (A small company is more likely to be driven by idealism of its owners.) Money means users, so if a good record on privacy attracts users you can be pretty sure they will do their best to have a good record. Not surprisingly Apple and Google do have an extraordinarily good record on keeping data they store secure - far better than most governments for example.
It does not surprise me at all both companies are making a song and dance about how they are safeguarding your location data, and I trust them to do everything within their power to make good on that promise. Unfortunately they aren't gods - if they receive a court order to cough it up, they will. So trust has limits.
that is just silly.
> bigger company is driven by money
Follow that money. Figure out who pays. Are you the customer?
The main mistake is that you compare, emotionally at least, Apple to an institute. But it's not, it's a commercial company. "We" never had or should have had any trust in commercial companies - maybe besides small ones as someone else noted here.
The problem is that as a society we allowed a few commercial companies to become such an inherent part of our lives.
For me, the discrepancy between apple marketing around the products and how it feels being stuck in the past as soon as having to build and support anything related to apple makes the whole company not likeable and not trustworthy.
Why do you assume we ever had that trust? Corporations and Government have never had personal data on such a scale before and we've never had such little control over this data. Especially with google, your expecting us to trust a spyware company.
> The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process
Anti-vaxers have been around as long as vaccinations have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#History
I'd say this trust has never existed, there was just an illusion that it was because we couldn't see into others bubbles so easily.
democracy is about individual freedoms and rights, not necessarily those of profit-seeking entities
btw I do own Apple shares so what about my rights not to have those expropriated.
If anti-monopoly offices were able to force Microsoft to offer competing browsers after OS installation, then they should force Apple and Google to offer competing App Stores, each with its own app policies.
I understand and completely empathize with your concern. I do think this lack of trust is and is going to cause very serious problems. However, this mistrust has been earned.
The incentives of large companies seem to be odds with what many people consider good for themselves or their communities.
We like to tell ourselves that a company’s goals must align with a community’s concerns or another company will come along and replace them. But this doesn’t seem to happen in reality and if it does, it can take decades which by that time, the damage is already done. Particularly if the company is above a certain size or retain a certain percent of their market. At scale companies can and regularly do act almost antagonistic towards their customers and the communities in which they live.
During some college research I found an older article from years ago and while I’ve looked repeatedly, I haven’t been able to find it again (If anyone knows it, please please let me know.) I’m running off of memory here so forgive me for the weak description. The author had researched and discovered how most very large companies used to require that every move they made would place a very high value on how it would impact their local community first and then place a high value on how the decision would impact their wider customer’s communities. These considerations played a massive role in whether or not they would move forward with the idea. If I’m remembering correctly this was written into these massive companies bylaws. Their first concern wasn’t regarding profit, it was about community impacts, and then profit came later in the decision.
I think we’ve gotten too far away from this and it’s going to cause even more damage than we’ve already seen. We’re so far away from this ideal and now an awful lot of companies will first decide if they can get away with something and if it will cause quarterly growth, then it’s worth moving forward on with little thought into wider impacts. This change has led to little if any thought going into the community wide second and third order effects. The fallout means we’re now dealing with a drastic diminishing trust in companies.
I share your concerns because I don’t think large organizations are inherently untrustworthy, and I know many (if not most) people inside these organizations have higher ideals and many companies have the best of intentions, but I think their hands are tied by systemic problems and these problems are eroding at fundamental societal trust systems.
Seeing Apples name on the PRISM slide was a gut bunch, you dont and will never get blind trust anymore.
Saying this is similar to the anti-vax movement is so frustrating for me to read when special closed courts are set up in my country to deliver verdicts on the legality of data acquisition and they STILL found the GCHQ overeached and illegally spied on citizens.
The UK gov has even decided to not use the API provided by Apple here so if I could trust Apple (which I don't) its being undermined by the fact the government decided to take Palantir on to help make it and it looks like they are getting involved in the US effort too.
The anti-vaxxers may be wrong, but boiling it down to a "celebrity's feels" seriously underestimates the movement, and likely adds to the reasons these people don't trust the institutions.
This is not an accident. A great deal of work has gone into destroying public trust and the capacity of institutions to make impartial decisions based on data. Partly from the profit motive, partly for destructive political purposes. And a lot of people in the tech industry and on here actively support the right to destroy that work by posting the most thoroughly debunked and dangerous lies on popular tech platforms - again for their own ideological purposes.
There are many reasons to challenge broad authoritarian policy. Don't pollute the dialog with anti-vaxers, that shuts down a completely legitimate conversation that should happen in a healthy society.
Accepting wide-spread social tracking unchallenged is worrisome. I should not have to explain to intelligent minds why. The paths you open up when you allow something like social compliance tracking and scoring are just terrifying. Way more terrifying for our children than the immediate health problems.
I understand that people are conscious about these things but what I don't understand is how people say "oh I'd never run an app using an API from google/apple, they have a horrible track record" and then carry a phone in their pocket with an OS from either Google or Apple, where those companies can basically do whatever they want. If you carry such a phone you already trust them. If this API does what it says it does (basically exchange random numbers) then how is that worse than what you already trust your phone to do?
I don't. But not because I think my dumbphone isn't also basically a mic I carry around, but because mobile devices are a joke, one and all. It's like moving back to communicating with infant sounds after I learned how to walk, form sentences and use tools -- why would I? Because so many people do, that they already assume everybody does?
I don't need e.g. Whatsapp to stay in contact with people I care about and who care about me, if I was only reachable by mail they'd send me letters. Anyone incapable of that I would surely dislike for dozens of other reasons already, so the question of "how to stay in contact even though I don't have a smartphone" literally didn't come up once since Apple "changed the world" in 2007, heh.
This stuff is just a very recent blip in our evolution as a species, and the phase we're in is about as impressive as the lies people told each other once they invented writing. It too shall pass.
Based on your comments above, I'd bet a lot of money that they wouldn't...
So, contact tracing apps that don’t use that system, such as the one from the UK (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52441428) still would be allowed to do location tracking.
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/04/nhs-opts-f...
https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/exclusive-wo...
The Apple/Google solution sounds much better to me - no central datastore.
Previously Apple were made to bend their rules when India threatened to ban Apple devices if they don't allow TRAI Do Not Disturb app in 2018.[2]
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.goi.aarogy...
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/30/apple-approves-india-dnd-app/
[3] https://paste.gg/p/anonymous/b7c95d3967514e78a652840b5b666d5...
It's scheduled for "mid-May"
Also I personally think the permissions(location and bluetooth) are fine for an app like this to really function. I have read someone mentioned on HN that these platforms prove their worth when >60% people are using them(I maybe remembering wrong though).
I do that will all the apps that require location access: local food delivery, cab services, vehicle rental and what not.
Recently this has also been made mandatory for employees, public and private. So organizations have to ensure all employees have this app on their smartphones. We will see how much this is enforced.
App knows their location, and app knows you’re near them. Location access by proxy.
Being on a stock, unrooted phone, the thing I miss most is xprivacy's prompts whenever an app wants to use a permission. I just make sure to check my permissions list every month or so to make sure Google hasn't silently allowed an app update to enable new permissions.
Is the source code of these apps something that could be FOI requested from NHSx seeing as it is publicly funded by the tax payer?
Also they've already started moving the goal posts; https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/04/uk_covid_app_human_...
This* came from NCSC - that image about the NHS version worries me greatly.
* https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contac...
IMHO Apple and Google should have finished the job and "volunteer" to make the app as well as "donate" some of the storages for the data. Not that I trust US companies to respect anyone's privacy, or to the fact that a gag order stapled to a subpoena would give all that data to the "5 eyes"(now 14-15).
I like my health as much as the next living human. But there are so many governments that will jump on this opportunity that it makes me want to avoid this app.
RIPA was passed in the year 2000 under a Labour government when Jack Straw was Home Secretary.
From the independent's website dated 19/11/2016:
The Snooper's Charter passed into law this week – say goodbye to your privacy
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/snoopers-charter-theres...
They are using the NHS brand to get high adoption.
Plus the UK govt slogan right now is literally "protect the NHS", the existing Conservative party opposition to the NHS is basically gone now, hopefully for good.
One does not follow from the other. Slogans substitute for competency and funding. The opposition is both ideological and directly financially motivated, so I expect the fragmentary privatization to continue.
Watch out for a "now we must pay for coronavirus" user surcharge appearing ...
https://tech.newstatesman.com/coronavirus/palantir-covid19-d...
No, you need viable alternatives for people to switch. Like the Impossible Burger and so on. Until then talking won’t change anything. Not even Snowden level revelations would change it. Sure you can try to use government to fight government. Or... just build the alternative.
We built the Web. We killed AOL MSN and Compuserve.
Build open source, end to end encrypted, self healing and rebalancing networks that use a version of Kademlia DHT that removes IP addresses from each hop. And also run consensus in small groups about stuff.
That’s the future right there. Trouble is, we are only seeing its infancy. I can think of about 2-3 projects that are pulling it off. And they have been working for years.
PS: When this happens, user accounts and quotas will be replaced with crypto, and centralized servers and databases will be only by opt in. They wouldn’t automatically be a thing just because they provide the infrastructure. Infra should become completely commoditized.
PPS: But. You’ll have to worry massivelu about botnets, sybil attacks and massive disinfo campaigns and reputationao attacks by sleeper AI bots. “Fun” times ahead ...
Yup ... I'll take the coronavirus, please.
It’s a giant federated search engine... that’s about it. They don’t even hold any data themselves, it all stays on site with the customer.
If you don’t like the data that organizations record, I’m right there with you, but demonizing the tools that allow them to access data more effectively is an absurd stance to take. Their system also does things like add an immutable audit log, or enforce requirements on how data can be accessed.
Working with law enforcement, before Palantir there was nothing preventing an officer from looking up their ex husband or wife, or celebrities, or anyone at random. With it, there’s an audit trail of every search, and most of them need a case number as justification. Even then, certain searches would automatically get flagged for review.
We can go back to giving people direct and unaudited SQL access if you’d like, but I’d prefer some more accountability, even if the downside is organizations being able to use data _they already have_ more effectively.
But Palantir has been the “tech boogieman” since before I even left in 2014, so it probably always will be. It is admittedly easier to blame a smaller tech company as a scapegoat than try to address the larger governmental or organizational actors that you actually have grievances against.
Just know it won’t do anything. The people who complain online aren’t their target market and never will be. And the paranoia lends way more credence to their dressed up search engine than it really deserves on technical merit alone.
So in a way the people complaining about it are making the issue they’re so upset about worse.
Or you can do both. You might as well suppose that people are critical of the mercenary company Blackwater because they want to avoid criticizing America foreign policy and military exploits. I don't think that's accurate at all, it's been my experience that people who are critical of one are very often critical of the other as well.
Similarly, it's been my experience that people critical of Palintar are also critical of the organizations and governments who use the services of Palintar.
And yes, of course, complaining about Palantir online isn't going to change the government policy. But if working for Palantir means that no other self-respecting software engineer will want to shake your hand, then fewer people will want to work there, and their surveillance tech will be lower quality and have more holes in it.
If so, please don’t tell me you’re a DBA.
A crucial step in shooting someone (or a drone strike) is figuring out who to target and where they are.
The fact that this is an important use case for Palantir makes it not hyperbole to talk about "weaponising information".
Everything has a domain it operates in, so I believe that statement has nuance. In particular when you look at how general or specific the domain is.
From the perspective of something uploaded to S3? It sure is like any other file.
From the perspective of a website dedicated to the dissemination of child porn? It clearly is more than "just bits" in that context.
How about from the perspective of a search engine, where that site may be indexed? Welcome to the grey area that all of these debates are rooted in. Technically it's just indexed strings or ngrams, so it is like any other type of file. But there's an argument that a search engine should "know more" than just the raw data, and should be able to understand that context somehow.
Palantir is in this grey area. The software isn't built for spying. It's built for managing and understanding vast amounts of data. Can this be used for spying? Yes. It can also be used for double blind clinical trials. Or maintaining insurance systems. Or coordinating disaster relief efforts.
It operates technologically in a very general domain, but their flexible user-defined ontology makes it very powerful at operating in more specific domains. So it's a lot less cut and dry than the dissenters make it seem, IMHO.
I don't think everyone associates government agencies with pristine records of holding themselves accountable.
If you’ve never worked with a government agency before, let me tell you, Hanlon’s Razor is in full effect. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The higher ups know that free reign for their officers to look up anything is a recipe for legal nightmares. The individual officers are often just too dumb to realize that they shouldn’t search for something, and do so out of curiosity. Having blocks in the way like requiring a case number be entered to run a search, and knowing that that search and results are forever associated to that case, cut down a lot on abuse.
Are all forms of abuse the same, or so easily mitigated? No, but I’d like for some system to audit that and at least try to enforce it.
The irony to me is that when I was at Palantir they talked extremely openly about all their technology. A ton of it was open sourced, and in depth tech talks were posted to YouTube, but almost no one watched them.
I think people just like writing them off as shady or sketchy because it’s easier than needing to reason about the clear ethical nuance that exists in the government contractor space.
You know, my dad always told me to just listen to people... eventually they'll tell you who they truly are.
The hits were all more or less expected, a bunch around their home and the precinct, local supermarkets, etc. But then a weird grouping way out of town. Detective insisted it was a mistake and wanted more data, thinking someone stole his license plate (insert eye roll here).
Anyways, zooming in and looking at the highest density of hits, it ended up being a strip club that he frequented. He got bright red and his buddies didn't stop giving him shit for it all day.
And this was a detective, not a beat officer.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but scapegoating the company is avoiding the real issue, which is the government policies or the enactment thereof.
HN won't let me reply to that, so I'll do it here. I didn't feel the need to offer a "defense" of Palantir there since I already outlined it above and don't feel like there's value in repeating myself.
But you asked, here you go - The government is going to use the data regardless, so long as they have it. The only effective recourse is to make them collecting or storing the data illegal, but good luck with that, seeing as even when it is illegal they do it anyways (see: Snowden).
Do you think is Palantir weren't there they'd just say "Ah well, I guess that's that" and be done with it? Nope; they'd go to Lockheed, Raytheon, IBM, or another long-time contractor to build a replacement almost immediately. The technology is genuinely nothing special. It federates searches across disparate database, and stitches results together.
But for me, having worked at Palantir, I know what mechanisms are provided to attempt to mitigate abuse. So as long as that data does exist and is going to be used, I'd prefer to have it be as well controlled and audited as possible. And sure, you can argue that the government may forego auditing, or be entirely corrupt, but that doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to not use tools that at least provide that capability.
If you want to see change that is more than just superficial, that’s where you need to make it.
Edit: Changed "we don't" to "I don't". I don't want to claim to speak for anyone else but myself.
I'm talking about neutering the surveillance state. That's not something that demonizing individual companies is ever going to do. You need to push for that change at the government level.
Unless you're pro-surveillance, but your previous comments made it seem like the opposite.
If someone comes into a gun shop and tells you they want to shoot up a classroom, selling them a pistol instead of a machine gun doesn't make you immune from judgement.
Want to know how a lot of that data is generated? Microsoft excel. Arguably without excel there would be less data to act abusively with. If only Microsoft just refused to sell excel to the government.
People are happy to accept that excel is general enough that it isn’t made for that one purpose, but refuse to apply the same reasoning to Palantir; that may seem like whataboutism, but they genuinely are comparable tools if you take away the marketing and fear mongering.
As for your analogy, it’s more like you own shop that makes metalworking tools, and someone buys some. You don’t know what they are going to do with it, and (here’s where it gets opinionated) you shouldn’t need to care. You sold a tool to someone. Can the tool be used to make a gun? Sure. But it can also be used for anything else involving metal work. At some point we need to accept that the responsibility for how a tool of used needs to be placed on the person using it.
We do not hear, "Government X purchases a couple thousand Excel licenses to keep a database on people it'd like to kill", and I imagine that Microsoft does not sell Excel to Government X in response to an RFP for tooling to keep track of people it'd like to kill.
(Of course, it'd probably stick its metaphorical fingers in its ears if it did hear about Excel being used for that purpose.)
So, basically "screw rule of law, people are gonna do it anyway, so let's make money off it!"
Do you ever use uber? They work to keep their drivers legally declared as contractors, despite treating them employees in all other regards. That’s pretty immoral, so I hope you don’t encourage it by supplying them with business.
Machine Learning/AI adds an entirely new perspective on big data. It can see patterns in data that would be meaningless without it, correlations that can't be found in other ways. Some data is OK for a government to have if they can just look it up in exceptional cases, but not if they act on every single bit of data collected.
In essence, using ML is creating new data (or at least: Information from the raw data). This information can be very revealing and not at all in line with the scope the data was initially collected under, which is one of the principles of GDPR.
You can't really view data as static once it's collected. Combining with other existing data and new methods of data analysis make it a totally different picture in terms of privacy.
I’d love to be in the utopia world where there is no war and the entire planet gets along. But even the US has political bipolar disorder, so we’re a looooong way from global peace.
I do think we spend an absurd and inappropriate amount on defense, but as long as we are forced to develop weapons due to the global geopolitical climate, I’d consider it preferable to work on making them more targeted.
My problem is I don’t like or agree with the people picking the targets, but that’s a whole other argument.
We could absolutely stop all weapons production in the US, I’d just ask for some time to learn Mandarin first.
The work defence contractors do and will continue to do is a measurable positive in the world. This work generally falls into three categories:
First is projects that make the lives of armed forces personnel easier. There is no moral or ethical hazard with these projects. They simply are making it so that pre-existing work, often non-combat work, is less tedious.
Second is projects that actively protect the lives of armed forces personnel and assets. Why would somebody have any reason to feel anything but pride in their work when they know that the only things it could ever do is save lives.
Third is the arguably morally shaky stuff. Weapons technology would fall under this category. The thing people seem to miss about this category however is what new projects' goals are. Very rarely is it ever to create a more lethal weapon. Almost all development of this kind focuses on either making existing technology cheaper, more precise, or have increased range.
In the first case, you could argue that it makes the weapons more likely to be used which is fair however if a weapon system is in active use already, it is unlikely that a cheaper version would do anything other than bring down operating costs. In the second case, these projects are actively making these weapons safer. Look at the Hellfire R9X as a prime example. This weapon sole purpose is to minimise casualties and minimise damage to the surrounding area. Finally the third and last case I mentioned. Increasing range is important for force projection reasons but the most immediate benefit is that it allows armed forces personnel to be further from danger. These people would be in this fight regardless but now they are able to operate from a safer distance instead.
Weapons tech gets a bad rap for obvious reasons but I see that as mostly having been a relic of a past era. Nowadays there isn't really any reason to make more lethal weapons. We already have those and you can see a steady trend in new military technology towards lower risks, costs, damage to the surroundings, and minimising civilian casualties.
Additionally, in my experience, you generally have a choice whether you work on a project or not. Leadership fully understands what they do as an organisation and get that some people may not be comfortable with doing certain projects. If you can't conscientiously work on a certain type of project, simply say so and leadership will take that into account when planning personnel assignments for projects.
TL;DR Armed conflict and existing weapons will never go away. What we as a society(namely the modern purpose of defence contractors) can do instead is make armed conflict less dangerous to those caught in the crossfire and those who risk life and limb to defend our countries.
Not judging your decision (although I personally prefer not working for defense/defense contractors), just pointing out that "it only makes soldiers safer!" isn't an ironclad rebuttal.
Analogy: Would you consider it unethical to provide tools and services that make the lives of human traffickers easier? To actively protect assets of drug lords distributing contaminated opiates and meth?
Slave- and drug trade are about as likely to go away as armed conflict.
This is in the same way that corrupt charity organisations can defraud the causes they claim to support and corporations can knowingly risk the lives of their workers due to either negligence, mismanagement, or for the sole purpose of saving costs or making more money. This doesn't make charities or corporations unethical solely because they have the potential to be.
Additionally, armed forces can and do maintain their operational fitness by using their immense logistics networks and pools of human labour to do very real quantifiable good in the world. Outside of their use as a deterrent and show of power, the US armed forces spends a large chunk of their time and effort responding to natural disasters, taking part in humanitarian efforts, and building infrastructure.
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On to the analogy, I would like to reframe both examples a bit.
For the purpose of this discussion, illegal transportation of individuals falls into two categories: Human trafficking and human smuggling. Human trafficking is done without consent of the individuals being transported. Conversely, human smuggling is done with consent. Despite being illegal, human smuggling provides a very important service to individuals. It may be against the law but it can be argued that it can provide a net benefit.
Mind you that it comes with severe downsides and by no means am I trying to minimise those. I'm just trying to keep this from turning into a 20 page essay on the topic. One of those downsides namely is that it increases the volume of people being transported which makes it cheaper and easier for human trafficking rings to operate. Another downside is that a large number of people die during transportation, both those consenting and non-consenting.
Now if you move onto the less clear cut outcomes, human smuggling allows individuals to enter a country without going through the vetting process. This opens a vector for criminals and terrorists to enter a country however at the same time, it provides a means for people who either aren't willing or aren't able to wait untold years to get a visa to enter the country only for it to then not be renewed a few months or years down the road. These may be individuals or families that want to be productive members of society in a country with a higher standard of living or are trying to move to a location where they can be treated for medical issues that they can't be treated for at home. Another common case in human smuggling is individuals using human smuggling to cross countries that have closed their borders to them so that they can get to a country that will accept them as refugees. The number of reasons somebody would illegally enter a country go on quite a bit and the list is full of both morally sound and morally reprehensible reasons.
With that in mind, while I personally wouldn't participate in any type of business connected to the illegal movement of people across national borders, I see no moral or ethical issues with someone who does so for the sole purpose of making the process safer. Despite the fact that it is illegal, the way I see it is that you are reducing the risk that people lose life and limb.
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Moving on to the other example. My opinion is that most drugs should be legalised and regulated. By moving to a legitimate market and starving these organisations' source of income, we should see drug lords be replaced by corporations. You could argue that the cartels would just find a new market but I see giving them one less black market to deal in as a plus. If this were to happen, in the US those drugs would be required to meet FDA & ATF standards. Sure those that don't would still exist much like improperly distilled/methylated moonshine is still an issue however I could only hope that deaths and injuries due to contaminations would plummet compared to where we are now. Why would you buy contaminated drugs when cheaper, pure, regulated, and mass produced variants exist legally. At this point wouldn't working to improve safety standards and effective distribution in this industry be no more morally or ethically problematic than working for existing alcohol and tobacco corporations?
Now past the hypothetical, I would argue that making things less dangerous would be tangential to your example. Making the drugs themselves less dangerous would be working to increase production standards and decrease contaminations and impurities. With regard to the transportation aspect, drug trafficking is extraordinarily dangerous for those involved. Drug mules expose themselves to immense risk when carrying large doses within their bodies across borders. This is by no means the only way the drugs are transported across the border but if somebody was already involved and wanted to make a difference, making this safer would be one way. Drug mules are often either doing so as a way to support themselves financially, as part of a deal to allow them to be smuggled across the border, or against their will in some cases due to human trafficking or blackmail. In most of those cases, the mule is a more or less unwilling participant. Lowering the risk for these individuals is in my eyes both morally and ethically valid.
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Ultimately I think all of this comes down to this. If you dedicate yourself to work that reduces the loss of life and limb, generally I find that to be a just cause. Defence contractors do this by developing weapon systems that operate at long range with surgical precision to minimise casualties. Armed forces generally do this by serving as a deterrent to violence and by responding to natural disasters and humanitarian crises. In the same sense, there can be people whose work with drug cartels and organisations facilitating illegal human transportation results in a positive impact on people.
Another way to put it would be that I would prefer a drug cartel making a pure product(of quality meeting FDA standards) that is transported without risking people's lives rather than what we have now. In the same way I would rather we have an organisation facilitating human smuggling and trafficking where nobody died or was permanently injured in transit than one where people died and were injured. Obviously in an ideal world we would prefer that there wasn't a reason for either to exist but like you said, they aren't going away any time soon and just because in these cases the organisation might be unethical it shouldn't make the people trying to improve the situation from the inside unethical.
Note: This post is a bit rushed and quite long winded as I wrote it up while taking a break and I've spent more time on this than I probably should have already. I would like to be able to actually write up a proper concise response with citations to back up my assertions however this should hopefully get enough of my point across.
> These people would be in this fight regardless but now they are able to operate from a safer distance instead.
I sincerely strongly doubt US would be fighting 5 wars with boots-on-the-ground in Afganistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Iraq, if it weren't for remotely-operated drones.
However, I also believe you are responsible for the consequences of the technology you create. If you decide to work on smart bombs and because of a bad government those end up killing innocent civilians, some of that blood is on your hands. If you're willing to accept the risk of that, I respect your choice.
Personally, I would rather avoid that by not working on that category of technology at all. It's not the kind of mark I want to leave on the world. I do appreciate that I only have the luxury of this choice because I live in a country where others do choose to work on defense so that I can be protected.
I agree with this to an extent, but at the same time, technologies you develop can go well beyond what you intended them to be. Do you think Ritchie knew C would be used the way it is today? It is used in UAVs, smart missiles, and more. Building faster algorithms also means faster weapons. Everyone working at SpaceX is directly or indirectly working on missile technology. You can do this with practically any technology, even as simple as building a better screw. Building materials that are stronger, lighter, and cheaper reduce the prices of homes, but it also has applications in war. Studying diseases and vaccines directly impacts biological warfare research.
It is easy to say you're responsible when you're working on things like smart bombs. But it isn't easy if you're researching fertilizer. The thing that arguably has saved the most lives yet how many lives have bombs and bullets taken?
> Personally, I would rather avoid that by not working on that category of technology at all.
So what I'm saying is you're working on that tech, just how removed are you? I also don't think there's a cognitive dissonance. You can be pro putting nitrogen in soil and anti explosive nitrates. But saying the two aren't related is naive.
Engaging in any kind of commerce (i.e. beyond growing food for yourself and your family) means paying taxes, which means funding governments and armies.
I don’t think both of those can be true simultaneously, unless you somehow consider “having blood on your hands” to be ethical.
If you're working on weapon systems that (you know or expect) will be just be directly used for murdering[1] innocent civilians, then you're endorsing murdering innocent civilians.
If you don't know where on that scale things are, then you're reasoning under uncertainty, and your ethics are going to have to deal with that.
0: technically most of those would actually be manslaughter, going by the usual definitions, but a: not all, b: that's not a verb.
1: nope, just murder
I don't generally believe in black and white, so I'm making no claims that anything is 100% ethical, 100% unethical, 100% blood on your hands, etc. I think it's possible for good people to work on weapons and still sleep soundly at night. I also think it's possible for good people to work on weapons and end up regretting the consequences of that choice.
People pretend they can't possibly know how things will get used, but this has never been true, and never been less true than today.
It's rather amazing the mental gymnastics people perform to get out of cognitive dissonance. I'm much more sympathetic with people who know exactly what they're working on and the full effects of that work, why some will find it distasteful, but nonetheless can at least make a case for why those people are wrong and the work important, rather than agreeing with them but hastily adding some transparent excuse to avoid being lumped in the distasteful category.
If you don’t like the bullshit the government does, that seems like an issue you should take up with the government, no? You’re using a tech company as a scapegoat.
And that's the problem – they're giving governments tools that let them more easily and effectively infringe on the privacy rights of their citizens. Privacy isn't invaded when the data is collected, although that's a necessary step; it's invaded when a cop or bureaucrat queries that data to see what a citizen has done. Giving them that tool is morally complicit.
~ "That's not my department," said Wernher von Braun. ~
Quite frankly, I don't think any reasonable person would consider selling software to the government to be morally corrupt unless they were reasonably confident the government would use it for evil. Right now, nobody has made a compelling-enough argument to make me believe the government will use this software for evil.
As for compelling arguments... is the history of most of the world's governments not enough for you? In US, you can look at the census for a case in point: this data was used to chase draft dodgers during WW1, and to compile list of Japanese for internment during WW2. Curiously, by WW2, the federal census law had specific provisions preventing the Bureau from disclosing that information to any other government agencies, precisely to prevent this kind of use - Congress simply repealed those provisions. Nevertheless, the Bureau subsequently denied sharing that data and buried any leads, so we didn't have definitive proof until this century.
Or we could talk about COINTELPRO, PRISM etc.
There are popular licenses with such clauses.
This is software that will ostensibly cut down on errors and speed up processing times for things like asylum claims, but for some reason Github was called out as being complicit.
I think the argument against Palantir is better formed than an argument against Github based on specificity of the tool, but I think both are driven more by viral outrage than careful consideration of any moral calculus or actual hands-on knowledge of how the tools are used.
Palantir is _explicitly_ contracted by a government to create a tool for combining surveillance information to make tracking individuals more effective.
Github is providing tools (Github Enterprise IIRC) which is presumable being used to create tools which are used to track and deport individuals.
Other databases get used to track down, torture, and murder critical journalists - by dismembering them with a bone saw while they're still alive.
Remind me again which kind of database Palantir staff work on?
The software was also used to run double blind clinical drug trials - the acl granularity was great at that; you could have different roles for drug manufacturers, doctors, and patients, none of which had absolute information. Then trial supervisors could open up the data for analysis at the end of the trial.
At that same time, the ability to use GPS phones to upload data over unreliable networks was used when they teamed up with the Clinton foundation and Team Rubicon to improve disaster relief coordination for hurricanes.
Myself or coworkers (“Palantir staff”) worked on all of these.
Also, I'd like to point out that this isn't an "either or" situation. Obviously the government is involved, as they no doubt put out the contracts, but Palantir is the one cashing the check. They've created their entire business model around big secretive government contracts.
P A L A N T I R.
Holy shit, and I didn't think that this whole contact tracing bullshit could look even worse.
I mean besides “zero to one” and “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”?
I wonder how much effect he had on Zuck early on. He was the first big check in. Seems it was a great match there.
Principles dont matter if you dont have the money to put them into practice.
If palantir is what it takes for him to fund/back a visionary company or leader that will create a truly freer society, then that investment was well worth it.
My question to you is why you care what Thiel thinks and why you're dissapointed. As far as I'm concerned, these guys are the lowest of the low and they only hold their position through gross exploitation.
Nobody should be amassing this impossible wealth and seeking to gain more and these CEOs are basically economic despots to my mind.
"In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."
This quote is from Hoppe's "Democracy: The God That Failed", which Thiel has referenced before. The overall thesis there is that economic freedom is the cornerstone of libertarianism, and it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, so libertarians have to explore other options. It specifically promotes monarchy, on the basis that a monarch is more like a business owner with a vested long-term interest.
You might argue that this isn't really libertarianism - indeed, many libertarians don't consider Hoppe to be one. This is basically proto-neo-reaction, at the point where it still hasn't explicitly rejected libertarianism altogether. But regardless of where you draw the line, this all is the evolution of Murray Rothbard's strain of libertarianism, after it moved away from social liberalism towards paleoconservatism - it's not just some random people coming and declaring their politics to be "libertarian" out of the blue. Nor is there any shortage of ex-libertarians in NRx circles, so it's clearly a common path, not unique to Thiel.
Needless to say, the libertarian paradise described above could use something like Palantir to implement the "covenant".
But the label is irrelevant, Thiel and Palantir's actions are anti-democratic and their involvement in any government activities immediately raise privacy and safety concerns.
Do you have any references showing Thiel believes these words you quoted?
In general, Thiel's political opinions are hardly a secret; you can read his own words at https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...:
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
This is literally the primary thesis of Hoppe's book.
And note that Hoppe's isn't saying that promoting homosexuality should get one expelled from society, but rather from communities with "covenants" that restrict it. This arrangement is all about one-dollar-one-vote, so rich people needn't worry - they can live however they want, even establishing their own "covenant" if need be.
That explanation is much more reasonable. If people can choose which covenant to belong to, that's better then some larger collective (like a federal government) imposing it's morals on smaller groups.
None. He is a slimy character with no principles or morals besides his own selfish drive. He wants to make money, period. Other considerations don't factor into it. Make no mistake, he (and people like him, the capitalist sociopaths that hold power in our society) would kill your entire family for a handful of pennies if they would get away with it.
If there were any justice in the world these kinds of people would be shunned and censored by society. Yet it's precisely the opposite. These are the behaviours which are encouraged and rewarded.
The issue is that the UK govt is composed of a combination of incompetent and corrupt people (one of the companies involved in this is owned by a minister). And they are trying to go with the low-cost option (whilst the govt is subsidising 1/4 of salaries paid in the whole country) rather than the old-school, proven way.
It is kind of shocking but it is the result of a political system (and culture) that rewards incompetence and sloth.
That's not untrue, but that's clearly not contact tracing, much less was-in-the-same-room tracing.
The reason I ask is, I also thought that it's "just supreme evil" until I listened to a podcast with Thiel (Dave Rubin podcast) recently... In it, he said that he started Palantir as an experiment, what can be done against organised crime/terrorism while respecting civil liberties and privacy. His argument was, that we do need to stop terrorism, because people (not HN crowd, but the public at large) are obviously not willing to compromise safety for privacy, so each terrorist attack results in privacy- & civil liberties-curtailing laws - so the question is, can we use data/ML/etc. to safeguard our society while preserving as much privacy & liberty as we can.
But I've almost no real (and insider) info about Palantir to judge whether that's actually what the organisation is, 10 years or so later.
Having said that I know nothing of Palantir, today was the first time I heard of it.
But I would never ever believe anything a CEO says in the media that can't be validated. Their very job is setting the company in a positive light above all else. Especially when it comes to vague terms about company ideals that can't be proven. And 10 years is an eternity in IT. Remember Google had their motto "Don't be evil". Look how that turned out.
There's no need for such a request. They themselves say "We intend to open source our codebase once the design is finalised" here: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/nhs-covid-19-app-privacy-secu...
That's what they recently told us they were not going to do after all. Because security.
:sigh:
I don't even think it will even be effective given the anticipated number of cases.
A contact tracing system and a virus with n days of non-symptomatic incubation, and international borders. Let's think this through a bit. Of what benefit is to the traveler admitting/host country (H) to note on the "medical passport" issued by origin country (O)? Obviously, for this thing to even work on paper, countries need to exchange massive amount of information.
The fact stands [challenge it!] that the socio-political regime being rolled out in guise of defense against Covid-19 and future viral friends aligns perfectly with a specific ideological position. It really was 'Nature's gift'.
What used to be accomplished via violent revolution is being accomplished with 'scientific' efficiency and very little blood. Oh, that figurative blood in the streets of middle and lower classes? "The Virus does not discriminate!".
I'm not sure about the hand me down binary model conclusion. We're in agreement regarding the inevitability of this turn of events, but then again it was apparently clear as day thousands of years ago to "self isolating" monks.
But the clarity of the choice is stark, and like a blast of cold air invigorates one's morals and character.
Good luck!
In a way I think this will actually hamper their efforts.
After all: With the corona tracing apps, people are becoming much more aware that their data is used to trace them. A lot of people I know are talking about leaving their phones at home when they go out.
Considering the carriers have had this data forever and are probably sharing it, this awareness is a good thing for privacy.
I've worked at a telco where we were analysing customer's behaviours and almost everyone follows a pattern at some point e.g. going from home, via public transport to work. The resolution isn't high but over time you build up enough samples to accurately determine exactly where they live, work etc.
You need to have enough people for that, you need to have the testing capacity and you need to have people following that order.
It will work well if you have very low community spread and can start tracing on cluster level. If you are not there it can still be a good tool but you would probably still need a lot of other restrictions as well.
If we do end up implementing a centralized contact tracing system, the results will be very interesting. I would love to know the name and location of every lobbyist that my elected representatives have met with, and I'm sure that in the name of public health they won't make any efforts to thwart this tracking.
In that case the governments do not need this silly contact tracing app. They can just use the data they already have.
We were required to sell the data to the government on demand due to CALEA and similar legislation.
Those who complain endlessly about AANG largely seem to have no idea of how our communications networks actually work. Your location, activities, banking, etc. are not private, will never be private, have never been private, and it has nothing to do with AANG. The 3 AANG that I have worked are woolly lambs. That F guy is a bit suspicious, but I don't have first hand knowledge.
For a start, installation of the app is voluntary so if you're planning something you really don't want the government to discover, you wouldn't install it.
Also, intelligence services already get call metadata so they know which mobile towers you are using and probably lots else.
As for effectiveness, I think it will be useful. There have been several papers crunching the numbers and it looks like it will have an effect. It doesn't need to be perfect - any non-trivial reduction in R is helpful.
https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/exclusive-wo...
If this was written by NSHX I would install it, but given the dodgy provenance and lack of open source there's no way I'm going to install it.
"We intend to open source our codebase once the first release is finalised. The documentation accompanying that release will supersede this paper."
and from https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contac...,
"The Secretary of State has also committed to making the source code open source. That may not happen immediately on release because the fabulous NHSX development team are all working hard on getting the product ready. But it will happen."
Sounds like there is an intention to deliver on the source. Bigger question is whether the server side is open sourced (as clearly that has limited value for verifying what is happening remotely).
That's just annoying nonsense though isn't it?
There are reasonable (well 'ok they happen, whatever') causes for delay in open-sourcing something that didn't start out that way, but... Do any of them take more than seconds of developer time? They mean it 'may not happen immediately, because it's stuck in legal', surely?
Also while the app on the phone has been released, the actual data wont be sent on to contract tracers until more testing and privacy policies are finalised.[0] [0]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-02/coronavirus-app-curre...
The source code should be released before the public release of the binaries, not after, and not doing so means they're trying to hide what the app does from timely public discourse.
Releasing a tarball (even if it lacks the tools to build it) isn't that hard, is it?
And if you disable iCloud, the data remains exclusively on your device.
And if you're in China, Apple stores both on Chinese government owned servers: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-...
To view Significant Locations, I have to provide my Touch ID again. Also, the fine print says "Significant Locations are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by Apple." Text repeated in "Location Services & Privacy"[0].
> It is used to provide you with personalized services, such as predictive traffic routing, and to build better Memories in Photos.
That's not Apple keeping the data, that's your phone keeping the data. And that data isn't accessible to Apple - only you and your device.
From page 6 of https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Location_Services_White_P...
"This data is not shared with third parties, is fully encrypted, and can’t be read by Apple."
Yes, the Equifax incident really showed us how data leaks ruin companies.
Sure, neither is probably perfect, but only one of them is an egregious violator whose business model depends on surveillance capitalism
It should be a complete no-brainer that everyone who is ok using google or apple maps, i.e. probably 95+% of the country, be ok downloading their local health department's contact tracing app if it uses these APIs. But we'll see how it plays out, in the end it will surely come down to how this is politicized and not actually be based on the technical merits of this protocol at all.
Free GPS and navigation services have a price. I doubt many people are going back to Garmin anytime soon. Just the way it is now.
there are other options though. ive been using openstreetmap for about 4 years and have only found the need to use Google once in all that time. although with openstreetmap being crowd sources it really depends on how much work has been done in a particular area but in my country its pretty decent
1. It’s actually crap and they don’t want their advertisers to know that their ads are sold based on crap quality data/don’t want the backlash of doing a poor job helping
2. Most people at google care a lot about privacy (either in the secret kept between you and google sense or the more common sense definition people seem to use on hn) and they don’t really think about this data as something the firm has/should release
3. They are afraid that if governments realised they had this data then google would be regulated or every minor security agency/random government department would be demanding access to it by law.
4. They strongly feel that surveillance by (well intentioned?) private companies is ok but by governments it os not.
When I worked at Google, I saw a lot of earnest efforts to keep data private, in a way that really was sufficient (k-anonymized with large k, for example), but in ways that have no outward proof that it was happening. Send all possible data to the server, then make sure it's properly clustered and scrubbed before it gets stored or analyzed. And it's not easy to explain to someone who can see the whole system that from an end-user's view this is identical to just scooping up everything.
5. They very much want this project to succeed so that it can save lives. They know privacy concerns are (rightly) an existential threat to the success of the project, so they are trying to address those by drawing this firm line.
It's not 1 or 3 because anyone can look at the location data Google gathers on them and judge for themselves if it's crap. Just search for "view google location history" and it will take you right there.
I think 2 is pretty close to the mark. Despite HN's understandably cynical take, everyone I talk to at Google cares a lot about user privacy.
You can only see the tiny fraction of data that relates to you, and only the data that has been identified to you. This says very little about the quality of the rest of the data google have. Doing the double slit experiment once with a single election will not tell you much about quantum mechanics.
is that really all there is? they are showing you everything? theres no shadow profile?
Also, Google and Apple where part of PRISM. So there is a history of cooperation.
i.e. A crappy mobile app that spams notifications when you're around someone who was in contact with Covid infected. One which doesn't have any oversight and motivation other than mobile ad views.
It's a lot easier for Google to operate on a whitelist model than a blacklist model.
What they’re effectively doing is creating a monopoly in the private sector. No other private company is allowed.
There has been a huge influx of people trying to upload scammy covid apps. As a result the mere mention of covid is enough to get your app flagged automatically.
I don't currently work on a covid app, but I know somebody who does. Their app was flagged but they were able to resolve it by contacting google.
Do they happen to be government-funded, or represent a health company as stated above? To be fair, I didn't follow up the rejection, I just assumed the rule would be set in stone and they wouldn't budge. The app was free, no ads or any method to profit from covid so I was pretty shocked.
I don't remember the specifics since I thankfully don't get my apps rejected often, but there should be a button to contact the play store support somewhere in the play store UI.
Unfortunately in this kind of situation, the play store handling, while understandable, does not make it easy for legitimate covid apps to be posted.
The most important thing is to get absolutely as many people possible using the technology.
Besides, for their own selfish reasons, neither Google or Apple want to be so blatantly attached to something that could be so easily abused.
Google and Apple need to advocate privacy for reasons. But they also want to help the government (PRISM example). So they carefully craft a bug that only government knows about and that allows the extraction of location data. If ever discovered it was not intentional. The NSA backdoor at RSA is an example [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa/excl...
I'd quite like my government to decide how contact tracing should work in my country, instead of two companies making that decision. I cannot vote against Apple or Google if I don't like what they do.
Also, I'd like to leave my home without worrying about catching a dangerous and possible fatal disease, and if I have to sacrifice some privacy to do this then that's ok.
Privacy is important, and it's lovely that IT people care so much about it, but all the people on zero-hour contracts and with underlying health conditions would probably rather that we prioritise the most effective approach to eliminating the virus.
I think these restrictions are meant to win confidence with a somewhat skeptical public. This will also confine the apps to be single purpose for contact tracing only.
If you disagree, could you please list ways you think this can be done?
Why isn't HN talking about the technical side at all?
We know Bluetooth on phones can't do what the governments says it can.
We've all gone through the stage of, what if we used Bluetooth to track people indoors and do cool stuff! Then we realise you can't. The best we see is advertising maybe doing low quality beacons.
It like we think C19 makes the impossible possible.
Source code is public and has been shared/audited on twitter etc but no formal audits that I’ve seen yet.
I don't believe that's true. There is certainly decompiled code floating around, but release of the code has been delayed whilst the Signals Directorate investigate the app. [0]
Worth noting that decompiling the app to see if it actually does what it says it does is a crime under the legislation backing it.
> Agreed. The PIA and source code will be released subject to consultation with the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre.
[0] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020...
The rolling ID doesn't work so 3rd parties can track you.
Source code has not been released at all.
It does not work in iOS I think is a fair statement. It won't until Apple do the update.
It does not check the 'proximity to infected people'.
All data processing is done by a human. The app just dumps all your info. All interactions with other phones with the app to a human. Then then work out times and if the person was 'close'
So this is why I've asked the question.
Surely someone on HN has made an android/iOS app and can comment. It would have to be around a phone Bluetoothing to a phone.
Nothing prevents anyone from using their phone's location history to remember what to tell the contact tracing people.
Contact tracing: Alice is able to say, “I was in contact with Bill and Carol.” Then authorities can talk to Bill and Carol, and have them trigger their phones to see who they’ve been near. But because that’s slow, most plans would upload the lists of who’s been near who to a central server. Then the authorities can do a simple query to see who’s been near who.
Exposure notification: Alice enters a code that she got with her positive test result in to the app. The app has been continually broadcasting rotating, random identifiers which it then uploads to the central service. The code she entered verifies to the central service that she has a legitimate positive result. Bob and Carol’s phones periodically check with the central server for the list of positive IDs. Their phones stored one of the IDs from Alice’s phone when they were near each other earlier. Once they get the latest list of infected IDs, their phones will alert them that they have been exposed and should be tested.
In CT, the central service has all the data, and you can trace contacts without the knowledge of the users. In EN, the service has a list of infected people, and everyone needs to check that list periodically.
Pretty sure there’s some subtlety with the IDs being a cryptographic sequence or something so there isn’t a gigantic list of IDs everybody is constantly pulling down, but this is the gist of it.
ETA: The FAQ from Apple+Google is a pretty quick rundown of where exactly each part of the data is stored and when it leaves your device. https://blog.google/documents/73/Exposure_Notification_-_FAQ...
So, it's good that apple+google are banning those apps because they would be useless and a damn spying vector.
It doesn't need to be perfectly effective to be useful. Even a small reduction in R is very helpful.
For all we know this is Cummings not understanding any of the science.
I don't like Cummings' politics but he is a smart guy. I think he'd follow the science.
One thing that's interesting to think about more deeply is how difficult it is to estimate proximity based on the combinatorial explosion of different hardware, individual device peculiarities, battery levels and environmental factors (walls, glass windows, partitions, ventilation).
The very limited data published appears like interesting preliminary field work which finds significant variability in signal strength across hardware, and rather than concluding proximity estimations are useful, ends in a plea for OEMs to release factory calibration data for their BLE implementations:
https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-calibration...
Perfect is the enemy of progress.
> to automate at scale
If you need to track circulating viruses "at scale" you have already failed, as the apps are going to be popping up false positives left and right and you end up with the entire population individually quarantining themselves.
It seems the sensible order of questions is:
1) Do we have a contact tracing problem?
2) Does digital contact tracing generally solve it?
3) Is the specific app / implementation useful / safe / privacy-respecting?
It appears the national conversation almost entirely skips thinking about 1) and 2) and gets lost in the limited analysis of 3).
We had a deeper look at 2) in this recent piece:
https://blog.crushthecurve.today/why-should-you-install-the-...
A contact is only registered after 15 minutes of time spent within an estimated proximity of 1.5 metres (itself a primitive model of infectious disease transmission based on a 1942 paper). Note other countries set the distance at 2 metres.
As outlined in other comments in this thread, close contact rules include anyone in a room for more than 2 hours, so even though all close contacts have to be manually interviewed (there is no instantaneous notification and isolation) for most social situations close contacts won't be registered through crude estimates of proximity: home, family / friends, work all require thinking about and providing contacts.
When you strip out all the situations that aren't beneficial, that starts to leave public transport in major metro situations where commutes are greater than 15 minutes.
Keep in mind that also implies the end of any social distancing (as otherwise no contacts are registered). That seems obvious, as public transport becomes overwhelmed if capacity is significantly reduced.
They didn't bother to get the servers running before pushing out a gigantic advertising campaign shaming anyone for not using it.
... Despite it having obvious flaws from day one, that showed it was mostly a cut 'n paste of Singapore's GPL app. (Though you can't access the source. National security trumps freedom of information and promises.)
Have you got something supporting this? Here's a panel of Australian-based security people decompiling and discussion the details of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3dN99ljgD4 Are you saying they've all publicly admitted to committing a crime and are unaware of those laws? Are all editors here https://docs.google.com/document/d/17GuApb1fG3Bn0_DVgDQgrtnd... criminals?
The only serious analysis I can find is in http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlLawInfoSci/2003/2.ht... and it's "kinda depends why you're doing it, but either way it's largely untested".
> A person must not decrypt encrypted COVID app data that is stored on a mobile telecommunications device.
That video shows them looking into how the data bundle is assembled, but I don't believe they actually touch it or run it in an emulator, which would very much breach the determination - because unless you're one of the exceptions, you're not legally allowed to run the software outside of tracing.
Exceptions are given for those in employ of the health department, or other government bodies.
Whilst that might vaguely not mean decompiling the app, the minister's own press conference is clearer on the intent [1]:
> It cannot leave the country, it cannot be accessed by anybody other than a state public health official, it cannot be used for any purpose other than the provision of data for the purposes of finding people with whom you have been in close contact, and it is punishable by jail if there is a breach of that.
Decompiling the app steps outside the provisions for looking at the data, and yes, you don't have permission to look at your own data.
[0] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2020L00480/Html/Text
[1] https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-greg-hunt-mp/med...
The determination is clearly aimed at data usage and prevents people from trying to decrypt the reports from other users. The whole fragment of the interview is about the data produced by the app and how it should be protected as sensitive information. I can't see anything there that would prevent you from reverse engineering "to see how any of the app is running."
It's not even obfuscated or protected from decompilation in any way, so it's trivial to look at with static analysis tools. (i.e. without trying to run it)
Even the headings don't mention the code: "Collection, use or disclosure of COVID app data", "Treatment of COVID app data", "Decrypting COVID app data", "Coercing the use of COVIDSafe".
Perhaps more than the intent, but this is a government that doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Circumventing any "access control technical protection measures" is currently a crime under Australian law (Section 116, Copyright Act). They may well consider any decompiling tools to fall under that particular law, as well as use of said tools.
In March, they pressured a university in firing someone researching into their own data breach to see how bad it is. [0] There isn't a law against de-identifying, especially when it is in the public interest, but they went ahead and threatened severe legal action anyway. Whilst simultaneously claiming that said data breach doesn't contain any personally identifiable information.
They had to be taken to the High Court to be shown that an algorithm cannot be used as evidence that a debt exists, and that decision makers actually need to do more than just trust the system. [1]
If it embarrasses them in any way, then they are not above twisting laws to suit them. [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/mar/08/melbo...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/28/robod...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-28/abc-not-appealing-fed...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EJWgZa...
Reading through its text, I can't find any clause having the effect that you describe.
1. Why are location data needed? What difference could it make vs just contacts?
2. Couldn't this ban be easily circumvented by telling people to install another app that shares location data?
EDIT: Nevermind. Looks like this only applies to apps using their new contact-tracing framework.
It uses Bluetooth proximity logs and local storage unless you test positive and are asked to upload.
I had a look at whats in the apps DB and it seems it just keeps a log of unique ids it bumps into. When you test positive and upload I'm guessing it publishes those unique ids if the logs show over 15 minutes of contact.
The government already have our locations via cell towers so they just have to match the data if they really wanted to.
The reality is the entire 'human in the loop' contact tracing process is still manual. Health staff working in state contact tracing teams still need to call and interview every contact to determine whether they could be considered a close contact from an epidemiological perspective.
Also consider that close contacts include anyone you've spent more than 2 hours in an enclosed room with.
So that immediately limits the utility of any bluetooth proximity app: you still need an entirely manual process for home, work, social gatherings - any situation where you are in an enclosed room.
We've taken a deeper look at the assumptions and expert opinion, both from individuals and institutions, which appear to discount this kind of system from providing significant value.
Even the product lead of Singapore's TraceTogether app, as a natural advocate for this kind of initiative, admits the technology is oversold and is only an additional tool (due to the significant potential for false positives / negatives):
https://blog.gds-gov.tech/automated-contact-tracing-is-not-a...
Why wouldn't they just auto-alert anyone who came in adequate proximity to get tested though? Surely there is some benefit to letting people know they need to be extra careful now and get tested ASAP.
All the manual human work can continue as normal.
The policy there probably reflects the understanding that people in the early stages of infection won't test positive or exhibit symptoms.
Contact tracing apps want to use location data to know when I might have been in contact with someone. If you do something like round the data to a suburban neighborhood or a densely populated city block in Manhattan, you can't effectively contact trace.
Any granularity of data that is useful for contact tracing would seemingly raise the same concerns that are leading to them banning this.
https://blog.google/documents/72/Exposure_Notifications_Serv...
Section 3.c.i
It sounds like this only applies to Google's own exposure notification service and would not apply to standalone contact-tracing apps such as the one being proposed by the UK government.
Shame, as a UK citizen I’m entirely supportive of the stance Apple and Google are taking.
The fact that there are plenty of other countries who are content to go with the Google/Apple API will also neutralize a lot of this type of criticism.
Dude, Governments have the power to tax millions of people. They don’t need your piddling bribery money. It’s too much work for too little reward.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies find this sort of information useful to further their agendas.
Oh wait, you're probably talking about the United States? It's scary how fucked up that place is just millimetres below the surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...
Edit: But then again, if there was an option to opt out that would be great too. Got to give people options!
"Privacy experts have warned that any cache of location data related to health issues could make businesses and individuals vulnerable to being ostracized if the data is exposed."
Apple and Google already have that data in-house, it's just as vulnerable as any data.
How is this not an absurd stance?
Apple Maps is allowed to use my location for the purpose of providing me directions. Sure privacy policies are usually overly broad but for sure “to allow Mark in accounting to track his ex’s” aren’t part of it.
I don’t see a contradiction in two large players refusing to cooperate with governments that want to slurp up people’s location data. They might lose the court case and be forced to allow it but I see no absurdity in the fight.
When you say, "Apple has the data in-house" - what are you referring to?
That's assuming the single-use codes are not persisted on the other side. Maybe they aren't.
"Apple has the ability to have the data in-house" / "Apple promises not to have the data in-house" would be more precise. The rest relies on the current behaviour and T&C.
But don't worry, just go on with your demonstrative "critical thinking"...