Hacker News Reader

Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

I've seen all sorts of solutions put together by municipalities big and small from counties to states to countries and everything in between during this whole Covid thing and the thing that struck me is how easy it was for them to essentially track you with perfect precision and tie it back to a phone number.

> 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.

View on HN

When you say Apple or Google installed, I assume you’re talking about exposure notifications that they built. I work at Apple and witnessed it. Nothing about it was slapdash and privacy was #1.

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.

[1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing

Here's one example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.alohasafe....

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.

What are you even trying to draw attention to here? This appears to be using the EN framework, which suggests it wouldn't have been approved for distribution if it collected any personal data or location information.

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.

Exactly. It's not like Exposure Notifications are meant to solve every single spreading case out there -- many people aren't even opting into it. But we need all the help we can get, so why not chip away at the problem?

I have no axe to grind at all. I'm just saying why I personally don't use it. I don't really have an opinion one way or the other. Please don't be so angry with me.

What you are 'just saying' is FUD. You don't know how the system works yet you keep coming back to this thread to defend your incorrect assumptions.

> All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it.

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.

It isn't fair to claim they were built with (1) no oversight, (2) hastily, and (3) out of plain view when you haven't even looked into how it works. AFAIK none of the implementations use location data.

In fact, Apple and Google won't accept apps that use both exposure notification and location APIs.

Your choice to be ignorant about the contact tracing frameworks is your own, but please stop spreading misinformation: https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/#exposu...

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.

> There were many locations who built their own apps that did not follow this privacy model, or used it incorrectly

We agree then.

You mentioned Apple & Google remotely installing something, so the only logical conclusion is that you're talking about Exposure Notifications (which btw are opt-in, not opt-out, so remotely installed is a mischaracterization here). If someone built their own solution and put it on the app store, then it doesn't really have much to do at all with Apple or Google outside of being distributed on their platforms, and certainly would never be remotely installed (at least on Apple platforms... I have no idea what Oppo might do in China for example, but whatever they'd be doing would likely be because some country law dictated it).

No we don't, because the systems you actually specified are known for a fact not to do the things you alleged that they do.

There is no amount of mental gymnastics you can do to turn “app that tracks when yours and other phones are together and does <something> about it” into something that is inside my moral boundaries.

Then I'd suggest you're not being reasonable at all, because the way it works is entirely consistent with a privacy-first methodology.

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.

And this is exactly why the apps failed: even HN readers don't know how they work.

And that's really a shame. It has the power to make an even larger dent in the epidemic. This is the cult of ignorance at play, where mistrust of all institutions (heavily fueled by need to get clicks to serve ads) means we can't have nice things.

I’m not ignorant just because I don’t want to be tracked, and slinging insults like this just reaffirms my beliefs :)

You are ignorant though. The whole point of EN is that you CAN'T be tracked.

Yeah, that’s the claim, but it conveniently ignores all the metadata that ties a particular device to certain places/times/events based on the other rotating IDs they’ve seen. It’s like Nintendo 3DS StreetPass but bad.

How do you ensure you're not tracked? That your location history is not sold to every bidder?

It's not an insult directed at a single person. I'm echoing Isaac Asimov's critique of American culture: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

There's some truth in what you're saying, but mistrust of institutions is completely rational in light of history. Empirically, ignorance in this context would be unskeptically trusting institutions.

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.

I really like what you touched on in this.

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

> They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight.

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

I’m assuming you didn’t read the white paper or anything about the implementation. No location tracking is happening.

You’re assumption about that and the full software implementation might be far apart. You can’t trust anybody with stuff like this as it will always be misused and abused until the perps are caught. The value of source code access is honesty.

If you have an iPhone and don’t trust Apple, you’re already compromised. Why would they wait for AirTags or Exposure Notifications to track your location when their entire OS is a black box?

That just doesn’t make sense to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com