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Comment by tompccs | Hacker News Reader

This is spot on and I think the reason why no country has been successful at digital contact tracing. The human factor is so important. In the UK we have recently scrapped our big, centralised contract tracing service because, among other reasons, people have been conditioned by years of robocalls to ignore out-of-area calls. So they have switched to smaller, local contact tracing centres embedded into the community. Plus, it's easy to send someone round if they don't pick up the phone.

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Except people have absolutely no obligation to any authority aside from the actual legislation in terms of lockdowns and what you are allowed/not allowed to do. The cummings story was basically the end of anyone actually respecting the government and their policies.

Do I need to take a test? No

Do I need to talk to a contact tracer? Nope

Do I need to share any information? Also no.

Because when the policy is against you every step of the way, you deincentivise people sharing valuable information, or encourage them to lie and perhaps maliciously/falsely claim you were near X person so they need to isolate too or just give them bad data, which is absolutely useless and meaningless.

The government haven't built a society that will respect what they want you to do, as if you do, you end up losing out in the process, such as missing weeks off work without 100% pay which is simply unacceptable.

People have absolutely no faith or trust in the government, and this pandemic has only highlighted many instances where they have gotten policy wrong, or why we shouldn't trust their "apps" (by releasing a trial app without doing a proper DPIA) or follow their policy as you end up getting fucked over.

People are already coming to the UK from abroad and not filling in their 'locator forms', nor are all of them being checked, nor are people being checked if they're isolating [1], which is probably for the best as even with a fine, it's likely better to just not bother giving them your information that will be stored for 7+ years (according to their privacy policy).

So until they fix that, nothing will change.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/iexgg5/daily_me...

> people have been conditioned by years of robocalls to ignore out-of-area calls.

This is so true!

In a somewhat recent local election, polling was showing the incumbent party winning easily. Of course, on election night, the left leaning party won and displaced the party that lead my province for 40 years, a huge upset that no one predicted.

It was also an election full of robocalls, mainly by the incumbent party. My thoughts on why polling was so off is that the only people answering their phone were those that supported the incumbents.

If you are a person supporting Party X and they are calling each day with a pre-recorded message, you may be more likely to answer. You are more likely to continue to answer your phone and respond to a pollster. If you support Party Y and the only phone calls you get are robocalls from Party X, you stop answering your phone, including those calls from the pollsters. Therefore the pollsters are actually measuring who is willing to answer their phone.

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