Well, the Apple/Google mechanism is not useful for surveillance.
Thanks I think I'll keep using the app
There was a very specific claim about the Google/Apple approach and its usefulness for surveillance and someone objected by teasing a possible pathway for using proximity tracing for surveillance.
One can acknowledge an approaches inherent risks without making absolute judgements about the approach in general.
Even then there is no reason to store that linkage so server compromises won't leak this information.
The contact tracking system does not add anything that is not present for tracking individuals. What it does provide is for two anonymous individuals to determine if they were in contact with each other for some period of time in the past.
The ability to do surveillance to see if an individual is in a particular place at a particular time is neither aided nor hindered by the contract tracing framework that Apple and Google provided.
For a very broad definition of "you" and for an unconventionally small set called "everyone". If you are forced to quarantine, a lot of people will know about your infection anyways, completely without any convoluted mental gymnastics about theoretical deanonyzation possibilities. Epidemic control has always been a very low privacy endeavor and app-based tracing following the Google/Apple model doesn't change that the tiniest bit. In fact of it was fully deployed it could replace a lot of far more invasive tracing, causing a net increase in privacy.
[1] https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
[1] technically this is optional, but not doing so also means you're not reporting your infected status to others, which kills the point of contact tracing.
The hypothetical malicious actor would need to have (1) listened at some location where you were and captured the key you were broadcasting at the time, (2) identified you by some other means, such as face recognition, while you were at that location, and (3) infiltrated the server where your phone uploaded its daily keys so they could find out what other keys came from the same device as the one they captured and correlated with you already.
If they do all that then they could tell which other locations they were capturing key broadcasts at that you visited.
If they have not gained access to the data at the upload server, then all they get from matching your key to your real identity at one location is what other key listening location you visited before the key rotated.
They could put the face recognition systems (or whatever they are using) at their other key listening stations...but then they don't need the keys.
This seems like a lot of effort for little gain on the part of the malicious actor.
This feels like a "slippery slope" argument. If so then I would argue the situation demands us to take a small step further towards the start of the slope.
You’re thinking the contact tracing platform somehow paves the way for an actual surveillance system, but it doesn’t. If they want to build a surveillance system then they will, and the success/failure/adoption rate of their contact tracing platform won’t affect that at all.
Building surveillance off the contact-tracing platform would allow the three-letter agencies to track movement of a single device regardless of whether or not you try to sever its connection to the cellular network. You might be able to hide a single device from the network, but would you be able to hide all the other devices around you that are trying to snitch on you?
Surveillance is more than just the technical means of data collection but also the societal framework in which it occurs. Contact tracing, if it worked, would have been a bunch of "good PR" for surveillance in general, and that affects how people will react to similar increases of data collection in the future. How to you think the FBI's 2015 case against Apple would have gone if there was already precedent for unlocking devices if the owner was thought to be infected?
They can do this without the contact tracing platform.
Regarding PR, that too can be done very well without a contact tracing “success story”. Also, forcing people to unlock their devices is not an element of the the contact tracing platform.
I’m not sure why you’re convinced the contact tracing platform is a necessary or even helpful step for any of these things you worry about. But it isn’t. You will be able to take more fruitful actions against these things once you understand that.