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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how quickly contact tracing applications will be leveraged for other uses. If a significant number of protesters are using such an application then I imagine government will throw the “for your protection“ excuse to go harvest information from the phones of protesters to see who was meeting with him and who their social circles are. Of course, to keep us and our children safe.

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That's a legitimate concern, but I think the German app is designed so that the government does not get the contact data.

Here's how I understand the system:

Your phone saves the ID numbers of the phones it's come into close contact with. The IDs are randomly generated, so they don't contain any information about the person carrying the phone. When someone tests positive for the virus, they can transmit their ID to a central server, which then broadcasts that ID to everyone with the app. The app checks that ID against its local list of contacts.

It's already happened in the wake of the events related to the unfortunate death of George Floyd. Police in minneapolis have admitted the use of contact tracing technology to locate protesters.

My understanding is that that was the police grabbing cell phone tower records from the cell service providers -- which they've always been able to do, it is a different (though still problematic) issue. The writers of the article conflated it with contact tracing.

I have brought up the same worry in similar threads. I think it's a given that once this sort of thing is accepted it will be implemented more broadly for our safety.

Given the situation in the us currently, installing one of these apps would at least give me pause.

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