If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.
> Except it wasn’t hastily built
They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight.
> nefarious way that you’re implying
I didn't imply any nefarious intent what so over. All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it.
Who has this data? No idea. How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. Does it draw more energy on my device or use more processing power? No idea.
That alone is enough to not use it.
In this system, it’s not easy at all for government agencies to track you. That was very explicitly part of the design, as is shown in all the public docs. It’s not like how it works is a secret [1].
Your location isn’t being tracked and put into a database. Nothing about exposure notifications uses location.
No idea if it's using the official API or what.
I honestly just don't believe that it can work well enough in some places. Especially here in Hawaii where gatherings are on a beach and people leave their cellphones in their car or backpacks or whatever. I was even recently at a camp where people were sharing a blunt and there wasn't a single phone in sight cause it was out of signal range. Could have easily been a super spreader event and the tech solution would have failed.
I get that you have an axe to grind here for some reason but I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make.
That it strays into the irrational at times is as human as the inevitable corruption that fuels the mistrust.
For someone without full knowledge of the technology to assume (in this case wrongly) there's a privacy issue is entirely practical. It's an assumption that will be correct far more than it won't.
People are responding to fear of past president. One could argue that it is highly unlikely that it will happen again. One could even PROVE that it is NOT happening again NOW - but you are still dealing with someone responding out of fear.
I feel like we are seeing the exact same phenomenon with (SOME) people who respond out of fear of catching the virus.
I would be really interested to learn more about why some people 1) are fearful of government tracking 2) are fearful of the virus 3) aren't fearful of either.
Personally I've watched my self move between all 3 over the past year - it has been a WILD ride
There were many locations who built their own apps that did not follow this privacy model, or used it incorrectly, but for most cases "your location data being put into some database" is not accurate.
We agree then.
That <something> by the way is to take the database that's only on your phone (and never uploaded) and show only you an alert. That's it.
If this is immoral, but letting covid spread around the world and have people needlessly suffer because you refuse reasonable interventions, then I don't know what is moral.
This is patently wrong. Exposure Notification apps (those using the official APIs, anyway) have no access to location APIs. The absolute worst they could possibly do is to log your IP address when you reach out for new data, but this is also true of every app you use, and every website you visit.
You don't really seem interested in understanding how they actually work, but if anyone else cares, https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ is a pretty reasonable explanation.
The amount of data that the Covid tracking API of Android and iOS makes available is precisely known. Germany's and a few other (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...) are open source.
> Who has this data? No idea.
The users on their individual devices.
> How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea.
It will be all but useless.
Except if you're in Singapore. Their tracing app morphed into a spy software for law enforcement: https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1384566617330229250
That just doesn’t make sense to me.
I still have it on my phone (although at least within my house I’m blocking their metrics via pinhole) but I 100% understand why someone would not want it on their phone.
What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app/blob/97bb16034140...
But the fact that they could be tracking which citizens have and have not been shown a "You have been exposed to Covid" alert, and there's no way to opt-out, is a little scary.
> What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
Most days, you are not exposed to covid and you don't interact with the app. So most days, the app transmits a "background-check" event to the server. This means the contents of the message will be the exact same length every day.
As a passive listener, then, you can watch for days where the length of the message is abnormal, and then because there's only so many different kinds of messages that the app sends and they all have unique lengths, you can infer what metrics events must have been sent to the server based on the delta of the message lengths. You can figure out if a user has been shown a "You have been exposed to COVID" based purely on passive listening to traffic from the device.
Right away I notice the glaring omission of “the surveillance state” in the wording of certain sentences like “People who test positive are not identified to other users, Google or Apple“.
“With Bob’s consent, his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys for his broadcast beacons to the cloud”, also giving away his geolocation in the process. My read of the “doesn’t collect location data” is “doesn’t explicitly collect location data”, like just because it doesn’t send a field ‘geolocation’ they can technically say that and not be lying. You should check out one of my very favorite blog posts of all time: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
And even then the default OS on the newer pinephones uses KDE as a DE which had telemetry built in at one point.