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.