This is honestly disgusting, it's the worst kind of lazy "think of the children" style rhetoric. I'd like to think this kind of argument stands on it's own as ridiculous, I guess we'll see.
> As he sees it, handing over health information is a relatively small price to pay if it means halting the spread of a virus that has ravaged the nation.
That "if" is doing a lot of work. Does BioButton actually help? Does it help even after mass vaccinations?
If it doesn't help, then why pay any price, no matter how small?
Or, just after what you quoted:
> He says the wearable technology seemed the least invasive way to catch symptoms early and give students tools to know if they might have early signs of, or potential exposure to, Covid-19.
How many false positives will it give? If there are 100 false positives to one true positive, then the signal will be drowned out in the noise.
On the other hand the consequences of a false positive are much smaller than those of a false negative. Inconvenience vs serious health problems or death.
So, what is the false positive rate? I pulled the 100-to-1 out of my ass. Maybe it's 10K-to-1 or only 5-to-1. Maybe the false negative rate is 19-to-1, which would also make it rather useless. Dunno. Does the school know? Is that information public? Sure would be nice to have, yes?
What does "inconvenience" mean? I think you're talking about inconvenience for the students. If so, I want you to consider what "inconvenience" means for the school administration.
They have many policies they could enforce. They could have mandatory campus-wide testing every three days, and if someone tests positive then the campus is closed until tests are negative for three weeks, and during that time all on-campus residents are in quarantine, and classes switch to 100% remote teaching.
Inconvenient, yes? But if the question is simply "Inconvenience vs serious health problems or death" then surely this inconvenience they could put up with, yes? It'll surely be more effective than this BioButton!
Instead, it sounds like the administration wants something which is more convenient and cheaper to their budget. If so, shouldn't they demonstrate that this convenience isn't some sort of high-tech smoke&mirrors to avoid paying for something that is actually effective?
It happened one time in am embarrassing manner, and that sucks, but when you put your grief next to the millions of people that died we can probably just continue to do this thing and deal with the embarrassing outcomes as they crop up.
That's only valid if the millions of people that died would not have died had people been turned away with fevers. From my understanding that is not the case.
There are also perfectly good justifications for not wanting a police state.
Until both sides understand that the other side has a point, we're not going to land anywhere reasonable.
If we had 100% compliance with the easy things:
* Social distancing of 6 feet
* Universal usage of 80% or more effective masks
* Vaccines
* Everything that can be done outdoors is
We probably wouldn't need the hard things.
Reasonable measures by everyone are far more effective than part of the population throwing all precautions to the wind, and part insisting on a draconian police state.
I'm concerned about economic shutdowns, closing schools, failing businesses, police state measures, and similar. Avoiding those means we all need to acknowledge the very real risk of COVID19, and while we might not agree with medical surveillance, that the people pushing for it have different values but aren't crazy.
I said it about the Patriot Act and I say it about this.
I mean, if we're in favor of universal health care where, by some rhetoric, we're forcing people at gunpoint to give their money to save others, why is this so bad?
As for heart rate and temperature, having this info over time can show:
When were you sleeping, active, potentially emotional?
When did a woman ovulate? Is she pregnant now? Did she have a miscarriage? Or maybe an abortion?
That's a judgement call to which people will have different reactions.
One way to look at it is to ask if there are other mechanisms to accomplish the same/similar goal, then ask which of these mechanisms is most aligned with our values.
A recent Lex Fridman interview of Po-Shen Loh [0] covered a privacy protecting NPI approach. An interesting aspect of the approach is that it works with people's self-interest of taking steps to stay healthy instead of attempting to work against people's self-interest in not being quarantined.
I don't love the tone, but the number of deaths is an indicator of cost when considering the trade-off.