5G and Beyond for Contact Tracing
zenodo.org
zenodo.org
It should be understood that there are papers about how to do both device free localization and identification with mm wave antenna arrays. Some of these papers explicitly mention that their methods are compatible with off the shelf 5G hardware.
From a marketing and business perspective, what do you think "edge computing" is all about? What do you think "internet of things" is really about? "Smart cities"? These slogans are all but bold faced exclamations of what was intended by technologies like this.
Where I live, last summer during the protests, the first place 5G towers was in the areas the protests were happening, in the midst of the protests. Why? Why did protestors in Hong Kong decide to cut them down? Why are the five eyes countries so concerned about the security risks of Huawei 5G hardware?
I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that really care about this and won't just get the latest iphone/Android they can afford once their old phone's screen is too cracked and the battery too aged.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis...
The cynic in me says this is true - not because this is anywhere near sufficient to allay the concerns of privacy advocates, but because it will allay the concerns of legislators and most people who are subject to it won't know the difference.
- If it's not FOSS it's spyware
- If it's got a camera it's probably going to a datacenter to run facial recognition and/or ALPR or similar
- If it requires a login they are modeling your behavior
Don't drive
Don't carry a cell phone (if you're worried about emergencies, HAM licenses and 2M radios are cheap.)
Don't use non-free software
Don't use hosted centralized technology from Facebook and Google or similar.
I might nominate Conspiracy-washing, or maybe conspiracy-flooding, drowning out the rational voices.
> limited deployment – any technology requires a sufficiently high number of users;
Sure, yes, that's true for anything.
> security and privacy concerns – many weaknesses and privacy leakages are documented
I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API.
> lack of reliability – BLE-based apps are prone to errors due to the usage of signal-strength measure- ments to infer contacts;
We did extensive testing and the only issues we found was that BLE couldn't tell distance very accurately, but still, we could, with high enough confidence, tell that two phones were within 5m of each other or so. There was also the issue of BLE signal going through walls, which meant you might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case.
> data governance – there exists a double standard in governing users’ location data, with fine-grained tracking of device location available only to private companies such as Google or Apple
Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data, only proximity data and even that is only stored on the users device and never transmitted elsewhere. GApple covid19 tracing api is based on the DP-3T tracing protocol, the (very human readable) whitepaper of which can be read here: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%...
There was a lot of disinformation regarding contact tracing apps, both from tin-foil hat wearers, incompetent (or maybe corrupt?) state officials as well as competing, centralized (and actually privacy-breaching) solutions. I can still see a lot of this going around.
data leaks in the api itself will come to light, rest assured. but as you said, the problems with everyting besides the vendor-api have already caused a lot of privacy havoc.
> ou might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case.
in a literal sense; yes :D but let me assure you that ppl putting their phone near a wall is absolutely not uncommon.
> Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data
again you seem to willfully misconstrue the allegation. let me tell you that just because the tracing app itself does not have precise location data, the problem of creating yet another record on your phone, attesting your behaviour, is not going away.
i take it you are not (yet?) critical of privacy implications of your $dayjob, but try to respect the concerns of ppl that are unilaterly affected by them.
From your short sentence, I can only guess what you mean, and it is at odds of what I get from the article, which says:
> Privacy is a key requirement of any contact tracing systems
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/t-mobile-has-been-ha...
mmWave deployment proposals have hit my desk from the big US carriers. All in include fiber/microwave backhaul throughout the campus. And that wouldn't even provide full coverage. Pervasive mmWave coverage starts to looks similar in size to 802.11 deployments. Between that and 5G sharing unlicensed spectrum with WiFi6E, it was a hard pass for us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev
I think the only safe option is E2E encrypted VoIP to a mobile phone used as a relay.
No, it has not created any such "need". "It's for yours and _everyone's_ health" is the most common premise used to reduce privacy and increase control over people.
No!
We already accepted destroying conviviality, limiting freedom of movement and taking a vaccine that has been fast tracked. At this point, I think I've done my part in concessions, especially in regards to following the directives of people and groups that have shown not to be trusted multiple times in the past and have been spreading so many contradictory messages in the last 2 years.
So no, officially accepting global tracking, in addition to the secret and scandalous one, is a no-go.
As an Australian, I can say with certainty contract trace does work for COVID. It is one of the tools Australia uses to keep it's cases near 0.
There are caveats of course. Contract tracing's big brother is the lock down, where everybody is forced to isolate. It's the big brother because all contact tracing does is limit the lock down to those who have been exposed. They are found by tracing the contacts of existing infections.
Contact tracing achilles heel it is labour intensive. It works beautifully, right up until the number of new infections overwhelm the labour force available to do the contact tracing. So in Australia contact trace is always paired with an initial lock down, to give the contact tracers a head start. Delta in particular with its R0 of 7 can easily overwhelm the man power before within a week if you don't stop it dead. (This has now happened in our most libertarian state, forcing said libertarian state into the longest and invasive lock downs we've seen in Australia.)
In Australia contact tracing was done with no technological help whatsoever at the start. It was all via interviews. Now we have QR codes everywhere, which you are by law required to scan when directed to do so by the Chief Medical Officer, which is invariable while there is local transmission. This is done as a force multiplier of course - it both raises the number of infections needed to overwhelm the system, and speeds up shutting down the outbreak. Time is money, and in this case the money is measured literally in billions.
The sad and bizarre outcome is those QR codes are very invasive - we had a much better solution available. If you visit places that must have QR codes (which broadly is any business), you by law must take a smart phone with the contact tracing app installed. You have to enter all your details into the contact tracing app. When you scan the QR code it uploads the exact time and place to government servers. The uploaded information has already been leaked beyond it's intended use.
In contrast the original bluetooth tracing app (and probably this 5G solution) was designed to never leak your position unless you become a close contact of a person contacted by the contact tracers. They were far more private and resistant to abuse. Yet Apple and Google effectively made them impossible to use, due to erstwhile "privacy considerations". And in doing so, forced the adoption of solutions where, as far as I can tell, privacy was never a design consideration.
My sense is, at the very least it doesn’t scale.
I thought opposite. Contact tracing should work well for strongly spreading (without much contacting) variant because it just trace nearby user rather than "contact".
I feel this one is rather new. People are by now trained to recognize the "we need surveillance due to kiddy porn" pattern. Many people are still unaware that the assumptions underlying most of the covid counter-measures are flawed and not supported by the data.
Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...
It was voluntary isolation of the sick, 'consider' shutting down of schools but only for 4 weeks or less, and to 'consider' social distancing - based only on the age profile of virus deaths.
We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response.
You'll also note that in this document, there is zero mention of contact tracing. Its basically impossible and fruitless for a respiratory virus. Attempting contact tracing is really just about pushing acceptance of general location tracking onto the population.
Now we are at at 1/10th of the deaths of our neighbour by population.
Contact tracing, as currently implemented in iOS and Android, does not reveal location data to third parties. There are many widespread uses of location data that are far worse for privacy.
For contact tracing to be useful, you need to:
- believe in the germ theory of disease
- believe in the ability to trace contacts at any level than pure randomness
These requirements are so low, it makes contact tracing at least theoretically useful at a level close to a tautology.
I find your document quite interesting in that it seems to recommend a lot of measures that we are using now.
Interesting how COVID has killed more people than the "projected" (though how confident these projections are, who knows) number. And of course, that's with us taking stricter precautions than some of the suggestions.
Looks like we actually forgot a lot also from much older events.
The following is from over 100 years ago.
https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/spanish-flu-...
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/16/multimedia/03even...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362677/
I’m not aware of any recommendations to wear gauze face masks.
I don’t know if the hill on the right or the one on the left had a higher peak, but it sure does seem like we managed to wade through the river in the valley in the middle.
“Don’t let some businesses be open, but let some of their competitors stay open, wear a T-shirt over your mouth, and gather in groups of not more than six before dispersing to forage for food in the supermarkets as often as you like.” How could that possibly fail to contain a contagious disease?
"Lockdowns work!" "Lockdowns didn't work in the West." "Those were no true lockdowns!"
This is essentially the summary of the parent comment.
Is it not obvious that doesn't work in a normal, free society? It's painfully depressing to think otherwise.
When you're enforcing an actual lockdown, thankfully it only takes a few weeks and people can go back to normal for the next 2-3 months. The tradeoff to liberty and freedom is more complex than it seems.
For example, New Zealand did it successfully, and I'd say there was a lot more freedom thanks to the times with low restrictions despite the brief but strong lockdowns.
A government exists at the pleasure of the governed.
You can’t look at any of these charts and point to where mandates started and stopped.
It’s almost as if they didn’t do a damn thing and in fact made things much worse.
After the initial wave China was covid free, people could travel freely and the economy was booming.
I don't believe this for one second.