CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
vice.com
vice.com
What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway political opinion, and other less than stellar purposes.
The CDC implemented an eviction moratorium for around a year (September 4, 2020 through August 26, 2021). That had very real, negative impact on landlords during that time. I doubt those effected would call it toothless.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/09/04/2020-19...
Makes zero sense to me that our pandemic response was about "keeping small businesses afloat" rather than keeping transmission low for a few weeks. I guess besides sacrificing grandma to the economy for $2 margaritas at Applebee's we should have evicted millions during winter so that landlords wouldn't be aversely affected by a pandemic. Weird how the eviction moratorium included aid for them as well, but I guess they were the real victims here and should have gotten more.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/01/25/nearly-20percent-of-rent...
But also, semi-related: they implemented a policy to prevent people from becoming homeless during a global pandemic and it had a negative impact on the people who have been padding their bank accounts for decades by steadily increasing margins on a basic life necessity. Sorry if I don't feel bad.
Care to elaborate? CDC has historically been an extremely powerful organization devoted to the safety of the US public.
They are a government institution, and not to be blindly trusted. They require oversight above and beyond what private institutions require. I'm not sure why you want to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
The CDC unliterally...
* Outlawed all evictions * Mandated masks on airplanes and public transportation * Banned migrants at the border * Grounded the entire cruise industry
And it's not that those things shouldn't be done. It's that they were done by a body with no checks and balances. None - whatsoever. There should not be a body in our government that can just make laws undemocratically. Or should there? This should be a cause of concern for everyone.
I'd say the worst thing about the past two years is how it's proven how absolutely fucked we are if anything more dangerous and lethal than Covid comes along. There'll be people like this making every effort to prevent governments from doing anything to protect people.
Turns out there are a lot of anarcho-capitalists out there, especially present here on HN, and especially loud during pandemic-related topics. And i thought it's one of those historical things that theoretically exists today as a fringe ( like actual neo-Nazis).
There's no question the CDC increased deaths by calling masks ineffective at the beginning of the pandemic. Their credibility never recovered, especially not when they are still flip flopping to this day (recommendations on masks oscillated by the week, often in response to public sentiment/political pressure -- not science).
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18319/priorities-f...
>virtually unlimited executive powers the CDC believes it has
is not true
Obama also had them author a massive study on all aspects of gun violence, but the results went quite against what the Dems wanted to claim, so it got pretty quiet again.
What happened is they did publish some studies, and one was quite bad (to this day the author will not release the dataset, for example), but was invoked for a lot of policy. Congress chastised them for it, banned them from advocating public policy, but they did not ban the CDC from studies (and they still do studies, very few - if you search you can find them).
That said, 2018 finally saw an interpretation of the Dickey Amendment codified that allowed, unambiguously, research into gun violence. And 2020 finally saw funding allocated for gun violence research. So, after over two decades, the CDC finally regained both the go ahead and the funding.
Given the above, I think it's still reasonable for people to use the shorthand of saying the CDC had been banned from doing gun violence research. Softening the language to be slightly less absolute would help, but I'd consider people to be in the ballpark of correct when they call it a ban on research. And it's also correct that that's no longer the case, thankfully.
Other than that, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted without replies.
Here are the recent CDC funded gun studies.
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/funded-resea...
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/funded-resea...
>virtually unlimited executive powers the CDC believes it has
is not true"
This is from the same user. That and the use of "even" in the other comment makes me think they believe that the CDC can't do/fund firearm research, as that is a common media/political narrative.
Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you?
I don't agree with anybody tracking me, but even say insurance companies which is the other worst thing that comes to mind have limited purview in what they might be interested in
Their charter is disease control. How you 'live your life' is orthogonal to that mission - they're responsible for stopping you from infecting other people with communicable diseases. That is also your own responsibility, and just because responsibilities aren't always things you want to do doesn't mean they're oppression.
orthogonal does not mean what you think it means given your usage. orthogonal means its entirely unrelated. but the fact is disease control and being able to make personal choices w/ respect to living your life can be in direct conflict means its not orthogonal.
apologies for this correction orthogonal is just one of my favorite words. =)
People understand that is their mission. Some find it scary.
Everyone has a different threshold at which they start to object to the CDC overriding people's freedom in the pursuit of disease control, but everyone will object at some point. For example, would you accept a Shanghai-style lockdown?
1: https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/pdf/Public-Health-Order_Gener...
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/about/index.html
> In 1979, the U.S. Surgeon General identified violent behavior as a key public health priority. In 1980, CDC began studying patterns of violence. This effort grew into a national program to reduce the death and disability associated with injuries outside the workplace. In 1992, CDC established the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) as the lead federal organization for violence prevention. The Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) is one of three divisions within NCIPC. DVP is focused on preventing violence and its consequences so that all people, families, and communities are safe, healthy, and free from violence.
They've been saying "Spanish Flu - give us money" for years and we find out that they didn't bother to research how any of the flus are transmitted.
It's not like flus haven't been killing 35-75k Americans every year for as long as anyone has counted.
Speaking of the Spanish Flu, Fauci's PhD was on how improvised masks made it worse...
Also, one of the big Spanish Flu outbreaks was "credited" to a parade, aka "a bunch of people walking down the street together." What did the CDC say about such events? (Hint: it praised them if they were BLM.)
Note that Covid-19 is SARS2 - SARS1 was 10 years ago.
If you consider this the epitomy of gish galloping then you haven't been near conspiracy forums with pages and pages of garbage links.
Most everything that is wrong with modern discourse is due to ad hominem and labeling rather than discussion of facts.
Yes? As the CDC's only enforcement mechanisms are generally small teams in tyvek suits with fertilizer sprayers with bleach. Their primary function is public advisement and their employees are civilian.
So yes, CIA, FBI, IRS, NSA, military, Homeland security (tsa and coast guard), grb; but also Facebook, apple, Google, at&t.
... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex?
Unless you buy into conspiracies, the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you, and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.
I don't want to get involved with what the CDC is doing here (because they're probably not doing anything too nefarious), but I would like to pull this point out. The intentions of an institution (or at least surface level justifications) are kind of unrelated to the point. What an institution thinks is best for someone and what that individual thinks is best for themselves are often quite different.
I'm reminded of the old CS Lewis quote here:
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Unless someone can prove that no one involved in the tuskegee "incident"[0] is no longer employed or influential at the CDC I will just resign myself to thinking that THEY are the conspiracy theorist, a conspiracy to seem infallible or at least incorruptible. Such a concept is of course ridiculous, don't turn off your brain with an appeal to authority.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
EDIT: spelling
The Tuskegee Experiment started 90 years ago and ended 50 years ago. I don't know what proof you need, but the simple facts of human biology basically guarantee that anyone who had any power during that timeframe is no longer working at the CDC.
I think we can talk about our concerns in a realistic way without resorting to baseless speculation. It's fair to question whether the CDC should be using this data.
The thing about Tuskegee is that it wasn't a conspiracy. It started in 1932, in a time when the majority of Americans probably would have supported it if they knew about it. That doesn't make it OK, but it does make it a poor example of a conspiracy.
Systems and incentives are much better predictors of behavior.
You can't go a decade of American history without some sort of "yeah that's F'ed up" thing happening that was done with good intentions. Saying constitutional checks and balances prevent bad things from happening is like when the police say they investigated themselves. In reality the public needs to remain vigilant and press the issue.
Technically, someone buying into conspiracies would at most have a correlation to CDC activities, it couldn't exert a causal force.
Also, you don't actually know what the CDC is going to do, or how well it is constrained by constitutional checks and balances - you can speculate and form a belief, but you do not have actual knowledge.
The mafia is easy. Pay them and they DGAF what you do. Creepy ex is more or less a non-issue because any threat of violence one person can bring can be matched by another one person.
It's the police, terrorists and other well resourced but potentially capricious organizations (like the CDC, or any other federal bureaucracy, obviously the trigger happy ones are higher on the list), the kind of organizations who can send a dozen thugs to kick in your door and who have diffused responsibility across so many people you can't "get even" that you don't want coming after you.
>the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you,
Every horror in history was committed with the best of intentions.
Edit: and to be clear, I'm not too worried about the CDC themselves, I'm worried about the legions of useful idiots that will happily take whatever they say and run with it. If the CDC makes BS or politically charged recommendations there is a myriad of other institutions (government and otherwise) that will see that as their ticket to do whatever bad thing they were already fishing for a reason to do. I don't want anyone having my data. But given the choice I'd rather have people who want to sell me penis pills and time shares have my data than people who want to tell me how to live.
So thousands of people that are burgled, mugged and murdered by random criminals every year are a non-problem. Organised crime is a non problem.
You suffering a hypothetical potential for overreach by the CDC in some undefined timeframe is a real problem
FBI, CIA, local police, any branch of military, Oathkeepers (a group that did track me for a while because I organized a pro-voting event in my city)... it's a very long list. Basically anyone with a gun and a desire to harm me is a lot scarier.
In the past, companies used to assassinate leaders of unionization efforts, too.
This describes every AdTech firm to a T, except that you’ve decided to direct your ire at a public health agency instead of them. The entire point of commercial advertising is to nudge your purchasing behavior (what they’ll blithely refer to as “lifestyle”); the CDC has no such motive.
This can’t be said for nudges: the entire point of an effective nudge is that you can’t be certain that you aren't acting of your own volition. That strikes me as a much worse state of affairs: not only are you controlled, but you don’t even know it!
TL;DR: two years after this entire fracas, it’s apparent that the government’s ability to force you to do anything w/r/t public health is mostly hollow. Meanwhile, the continence of our actions online seems to be increasingly shaky.
Personally I'm sticking with the scientists, atleast they earnt that power through real excellence rather than winning some popularity contest.
That's not a fair response given the examples provided to you.
OP's comment mentioned the Cambridge Analytica case which-- if true-- is certainly more concerning than someone advertising at you.
It's one thing to argue that case was overblown, but it's not serious to sweep it into the bin of "otherwise grab my attention."
Edit: changed the word "satisfactory" to "fair." It's not that the comment I'm replying to wasn't tasty enough for my enjoyment or something. It's more that it hand-waved away the point OP was making.
To your point, yes we shouldn't allow tracking. But, whatever fix we apply should not be so limited that it only affects the CDC, it should be generally applied to stop all groups as well.
In principle, I agree with the idea of anonymous data used exclusively and apolitically to "understand society" as you say. I just see no evidence that would ever be possible, either to trust that it will be kept anonymous or that whatever conclusion get drawn from it and acted upon will be remotely nonpartisan. It's sad in a sense, but I think the only viable solution is to reject any notion of tracking, no matter how much anyone swears they'll only use it for what they consider good.
That said, I may be missing something but I still think it's less worrisome to hear that private companies are using information that customers didn't actively hide and provided by voluntarily using their product (I still don't like it, but I don't think it should be illegal for a company to say "we're giving you this tracking device", use it and get a discount). Compared with the government, given the whole "monopoly of violence" thing or whatever weaker version you like, and also as the agent of the people, to be using that data, I think is a whole different think. Same as there is a difference between an ISP logging your internet traffic, and one voluntarily giving that information to the government and effectively becoming a government agency.
Anyway, this is going too far astray, and getting too long, you see my point about the distinction
The CDC primarily exists to address collective risk with collective decisions in the face of public health and especially infectious disease events where the dynamics are inevitably collective.
Sometimes collective decisions curb individual freedom -- like curbs literally do, along with a host of related automotive policies one could use as analogs. Criticizing the CDC for "wanting a say" is like criticizing any other area in which collective government wants a say: it's fine to talk about limits to what government should be able to require and what would constitute a compelling reason for doing so (and in fact, that's what citizens of a democratic republic should do), but speaking as if it's a threat to "want a say" in general is unbalanced.
> And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science".
Whether they decide to make their decisions on the basis of science observation and study or not, no public institution in the United States has unchecked power, there are always avenues for feedback and change, especially if you have a point that other people find persuasive.
And personally, I'd prefer most institutions made their decisions informed by scientific efforts, which would make them accountable both to fellow professionals in their field and other democratic institutions.
Data's a part of scientific efforts.
Although we've have had a chance to see some of the issues with mismatched state-level responses. Infectious agents don't seem to care much about any border their hosts can cross.
I find it incredible that people are capable of discrediting the very process that resulted in the platform for their ability to express that.
The ability for you to press a key, have that intent transmitted to a micro-circuit, have that micro-circuit calculate how to display that character on a pixel grid, and see that result on a display is the result of more than a millenia of an intellectual process called "science." The same intellectual process discovered germs in ~1665, or 368 years ago. Very shortly after we discovered germs we realized that isolation would prevent the spread of germs from one person to another.
People who referred to it as "science," chose to discredit/ignore it and put scientists into the situation where they were trying to figure out how to keep a sinking ship afloat. You know, by doing what scientists have always done: drawing facts from real-world data.
But no, let's rather believe that 368 years ago some rotten fellow initiated massive a conspiracy, which millions of "scientists" for generations to come kept secret, so that in the 2020's the CDC could collect cellphone data for a few months and ruin your insurance profile.
Also, HIPAA.
Nobody was trying to discredit science.
Some people refer to "science" (in quotes) because any criticism of a policy or individual was cynically dismissed as a criticism of science itself.
"So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science" is an actual quote by someone in power to shut sceptics down.
The people who used science as a shield from criticism of course wanted everyone to forget that in complex situations, especially in a new situation where not enough data is available, it's very common that scientists disagree on something.
Being sceptical of a scientist's interpretation of reality is actually science.
Do you think the average American knows more about these issues than the CDC? If so, how did they go about getting their knowledge?
The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucrats who have professional reputations, career trajectory, office politics, and other competing incentives that compete and often conflict with their stated goal of making the "best health decisions" for everyone.
This has resulted in the absurd patchwork of logically inconsistent mask and vaccine rules that we've all be subjected to for the past 2 years. For me, this has firmly demonstrated that the structure of these institutions and their methods of public communication have lost the public trust and we cannot give them broad, sweeping powers.
If your concern is changing rules over time that seems more optimal than maintaining the most draconian rules both from a freedom standpoint and a public health one. Essentially you want enough exposure to push herd immunity or lockdown never ends, but not excessive exposure or the health system collapses. If you track the number of people in hospitals over time especially in terms of local hotspots it explains the CDC’s behavior quite well.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend
More importantly. Average knowledge is not important. What matters is that exchange happens so that the optimal decision is arrived at and communicated much faster by a large group , even if each individual knows very little information themselves.
This is the same principle that rules over new tech adoption. You don't need to know how to replicate the new tech, or even how to operate it.
You just need to know it works . That's what real (applied?) knowledge is about, at least in the context above.
"Sir, we've dropped your health insurance policy because we've noticed from your location history that you frequent fast food restaurants, which is defined in your health insurance policy as a 'prohibited unhealthy lifestyle'."
"Sir, we've determined from your location history that you average 5 mph over the speed limit, so we're reclasifying you as a 'high risk' driver and increasing your premiums"
I don't see them believing they have unchecked power, or they would ne enjoying their magical empire right now. And I have no idea what specific harm CDC tracking could enable, even assuming they tried?
This was a public health agency recommending the most trivial countermeasures against the worst acute disease afflicting the world in a century. A three-year old with a LEGO understanding of germ theory and bodily fluids would come up with masks and staying away from other people. As the pandemic ends, so do all countermeasures, and life rapidly returns to normal. It is utterly insane to see this sequence of events as anything but the most obvious, predictable, harmless, working-as-intended storyline.
Well the context of DISEASE CONTROL is different from the context of individuals living their best lives. Take as long as you need to wrap your head around that.
Would you like me to show this to my friends who work at the CDC and record their reactions for you? Oh how they wish...
The CDC doesn't want to control you, they just want you to wash your damn hands. They aren't invoking 'science' (with or without the scare quotes) - they are doing science because understanding whether, how, and why people follow the requests of public health officials is useful to know to both model and make decisions about the next pandemic. It is also just basically their mandate.
this ' ' ' science ' ' ' is more about realizing that ' ' ' controlling people ' ' ' is a lost cause, and just trying to figure out how to prevent the spread of infectitious diseases given the new reality of self important typhoid marys.
The fact that you think the people who eradicated smallpox are scarier than the CIA or facebook is just patently absurd.
They do.
It says "disease control" in the tin. If you aren't a sterile robot, you're a potential disease carrier. Connecting the dots isn't hard.
Prime weaponizable mandate. Of course there's those advertised constitutional/human rights, but, hey, it's just for the duration ...
You know the spiel. The classic Roman 6-month limit on dictatorship wasn't worth much either.
> bound by boards and ethics committees
Is there any evidence an ethics committee was party to this? If in fact, one was, they found it ethical to consume personally identifiable data without those persons’ authorization?
I assume this classifies as research so it should be subject to the same ethical requirements.
https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/census/feature/j...
Personally, I would really prefer a system where health information was centralized and easily transferrable to healthcare providers, as I think it would be massively better if we could learn from the bad outcomes of others rather than creating thousands of information silos that have to learn these expensive lessons in parallel, and it would also allow us to know the prices of healthcare services thereby enabling efficient markets to develop.
Ideally you'd want to stop both, but if I had to choose I'd prefer that only the government has access rather than the highest bidder (which can be the government if they so desire, so in the end you're back at square one anyway).
One pretty nasty example would be revenge porn.
a lesser one would be piracy of copyright material
> Governments have a long and storied record of data abuse, from the Stasi in East Germany to LoveInt at the CIA.
"Governments" is far too coarse-grained of a category; it invites sloppy thinking.
Which of these is more common and useful?
The first step should be to separate the identity from the data. The phone's ID is plenty for research purposes, keep the name out of it.
Lumping everything into "Government" and not government is partly why American society is completely broken in some regards.
Some people focus their attention on limiting the government's ability to collect this information, but just go about ignoring businesses being legally allowed to keep and sell this data. Now the government is leveraging privatized markets for all of their spying needs and it is neatly kept out of the courts.
As the article points out, it wasn't just the CDC performing these kinds of analysis. News organizations were doing the same thing.
If we want to curb government surveillance, we need to curb corporate surveillance by legally enshrining a right to privacy that limits the information that companies can collect and sell. Which, ironically, will mean government regulation and enforcement.
The problem is this data is not owned by the individual.
Which will mean government guidelines and optional private enforcement via lawsuit with meaningful minimum penalties.
Nip those two things in the bud and the problems will slow down, I think. But it's a pipe-dream, I know.
In the early days of Android, I remember reading that Android was Android because you had to jump through all these permission hoops with j2me (Java 2 Mobile Edition). Hence, Android was better and more easy to use than j2me. Here we are, 15 years later with exactly the same set of permissions problems... with one exception, Android still gives out internet access without permission. Many devs here would be aghast at the idea of an app not being internet connected.
I believe Google did it that way because Steve Jobs had done it that way in the iPod and iPhones. (I presume there's some HN'ers here that can refute this?) I remember my colleagues at the time remarking how refreshing it was to not have to deal with permissions (because customers disliked all the modal permissions that popped up in j2me)... and we all jumped on board the iPhone and Android development train, not knowing the problems that we'd have down the line.
If you had really strong safeguards, maybe you can stop the government from accessing it directly but what kind of safeguards are going to stop contractors of contractors of contractors from doing what every other private company does?
The damage it is doing far outweighs the benefits of temporary profits.
It actually sounds like the anonymization and aggregation was done pretty well for this. There's no such thing as 100% anonymity, but there are useful levels of anonymity.
The fact that we don't have a standardized way of blessing data with varying known levels of privacy, checked and enforced by law, is kind of ridiculous in 2022.
If you want to maximize privacy here, then let's pass laws to prevent doctors from knowing the gender, age, and weight of any of their patients.
I 100% agree that privacy is handled way, way too loosely in general, and this does look like the CDC was a lot more interested in a grab bag of use cases than it was with maintaining anonymity. But surely that's an indictment of our societal failure to regulate data brokers? It shouldn't be up to the CDC to act counter to their mission.
I am fine with my doctor knowing this about me. I am not fine with any doctor who does not see me as a patient knowing anything at all about me.
> This is an excellent use of the data, a proof that it is worthwhile for the data to exist
The use of the data is fine, but as for the data existing, I also find that to be questionable (in its current form). The particular issue that I have is that the data is used without true consent, and as such is tainted.
OTOH, I suspect that "being OK with the CDC tracking your movements via GPS" would eliminate a very important cohort from the study.
Which brings me back to your original statement:
> a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy
I don't genuinely don't know that we can have both (informed consent) and (quality data).
> I am fine with my doctor knowing this about me. I am not fine with any doctor who does not see me as a patient knowing anything at all about me.
I am ok with my doctor knowing there was a 12% chance that I broke curfew during a pandemic lockdown, given my zip code or whatever. I don't think it's a black and white thing. Especially since you can't have the extreme of no data—the data is already out there, in massive quantities, and mostly uncontrolled.
>> a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy
> I don't genuinely don't know that we can have both (informed consent) and (quality data).
Oh, we can't, not anywhere near the optimal balance anyway. Because people. (And therefore governments, and laws, and everything else.) But I guess I still think that whatever crappy balance we can come up with is better than organizations that can make good use out of collections like this sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending there's no way to know certain things that all the bad actors already know because they're willing to buy this stuff on the black market. It leads to dogs and cats living together and people writing really bad run-on sentences like the previous one.
I am asking this out of genuine curiosity: Why? What actionable information does that tell your doctor about you, specifically?
Medicine should not be one size fits all when better relevant data are available.
Different but related: I personally use similar information to determine the risk of various behaviors. Going to a meeting in someone's house where people won't be masked? Not a big deal if the current rate of community infection is very low in my local community. Playdate for my kids with friends who I know are not vaccinated for measles or pertussis or anything else? Depends on whether those are going around—and if they are, then I'd like to know how many kids are unvaccinated whether or not they're lying about it. If there's a way to get that aggregate information.
Risk profiles for less common diseases make sense, but these are questions your doctor should ask regardless of the infection rate of your zip code in a pandemic scenario, however.
> Medicine should not be one size fits all
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect tests for most obvious fit of your symptoms (with followups for less likely causes if those are negative) rather than needing to do statistics puzzles for every patient that comes in through the door.
What bothers me is how shady this is. Government shouldn't reach out to gray-area thugs for supply, and they should not try to keep their methods secret. Keep in mind public health authorities are absolutely dependent upon their reputation and track record. Having high trust is critical for ensuring voluntary compliance when shit hits the fan. They seem entirely unaware of this and operates more like an intelligence agency. Even if you're still trusting of CDC, can you at least see how these actions risk eroding that for others?
I also have heard that this has been a common technique amongst academic epidemiologists during the pandemic. Because it's actually all above board, and super useful.
Still sounds SUPER F*NG CREEPY. But it's commonplace.
Once again, "conspiracy theorists" were right. I'm beginning to think the governments of the world are reading them for ideas.
>The fact that we don't have a standardized way of blessing data with varying known levels of privacy, checked and enforced by law, is kind of ridiculous in 2022.
Sure, and then as soon as that happens, someone who has patented/copyrighted the process coincidentally is handed a government mandated empire worth millions in licensing fees. Look into ICD-10 codes if you need an example. It's the classic college professor scam where they write the textbook and force everyone to buy it.
>It shouldn't be up to the CDC to act counter to their mission.
If CDC can't do the job without violating 4th amendment, it shouldn't exist. It's not a "private company" and the bill of rights exists for a good reason.
That commercial data isn't something any court would call a violation of the 4th amendment.
>It's not rape if you consent to sex but I slip off the condom when you aren't looking.
If the government is explicitly not allowed to collect this data, then buying it is simply a different form of data collection.
Like you can have a legal theory about something and it doesn't mean shit if courts don't accept it.
Sure, but the courts are the government too. Which boils down to
>The government has decided the government should have more power over you.
or maybe
>I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further.
Right how? That private companies track every movement on your phone and that it's available on the market for anyone to purchase? We've spoken about that for years on HN, how is that a conspiracy theory? That's exactly what Apple has said publicly they want to fight.
In actual fact, I'm not entirely comfortable with the "large city" granularity either. I don't want a city that is majority black to be treated differently using the excuse of their aggregated health data, for instance. I think these types of data collections need to be treated very seriously, requiring justification for specific uses, tracking where it lives and enforcing penalties when it shows up elsewhere. Because these data are going to be out there and used. If they aren't managed responsibly, they'll be sold on the black market and used in completely uncontrolled ways.
It looks like this is a method to circumvent the law.
Furthermore with regards to the misleading headline, apart from a few counties in California there were no "lockdown orders" in the US. There were closed businesses [0], and there were suggestions that individuals stay home. There were no widespread orders with the force of law telling individuals that they must stay in their homes.
[0] who I feel for, especially when things like small hardware stores had to shut down while Home Depot could remain open.
Now, I can't decide how I feel. As a researcher (and someone interested in human behavior generally), it would be interesting to know how people reacted to the various measures attempted during the pandemic. On the other hand, the federal government analyzing the movement patterns of individuals is creepy-as-hell.
Is it unethical to study behavior of the populous? If anything bringing it into a clinical study probably brought more oversight in terms of ethical handling, and aggregation/anonymization of data than the source would provide.
Facebook doesn't sell data. They place ads, but the data stays in-house.
There is a world of difference between that and companies you can't really opt out of doing business with if you want to live in mainstream society (cell providers, banks, etc.) making you click 'agree' on some 50k line dump of legalese and then selling granular, non-anonymous personal data to anyone willing to pay.
Frankly, the hysteria around "Big Tech" "selling your data" is misplaced and probably paid for by the lobbying arms of the real abusers. "Big Tech" is far from blameless, but it's a teddy bear compared to how other industries treat us.
Anonymized... for you.
What bothers me is that if this data is not anonymized properly then that's one really bad leak waiting to happen. For example: if someone has someone else's location patterns they can plan a robbery on their home at the optimal time.
Not only this, but I think that if we as a society are going to collect data en masse there has to be a legitimate opt out for the people who aren't interested. I think forcing blanket surveillance on everyone is just going to sew further trust issues down the road and a good compromise is letting people opt out, but providing additional services and conveniences if they opt in.
The significant first paragraphs here show, not only is this a PR effort, but noting US Constitution protected places (churches), intimate family ties (school) and by law, other sovereign nations (First People lands in North America) show to me, a non-lawyer, that there is going to be a serious penalty sought legally by someone, somehow.
I say, nail these companies to the wall. The industry was bursting at the seams to sell this, with super-fancy data viz eye-candy ala Palantir and crew. There is lust for this, not just the money. Mapbox I am looking at you.
(disclosure, I did not work on these data)
You don’t have to guess. The data is self-serve purchasable from their website so you can go take a look at what it looks like. Go find a blog post of theirs and you’ll get a coupon code so you’re not paying and then you can look at what the data looks like.
So glad I don't own a newer car with a cellular modem built into it. Hope I can die and be buried with my current "dumb" cards.
There are acceptable steps to take in order to remove yourself and some of your data from the things you disagree with, but just because you can't reach step 10 right now, doesn't mean you should take step 1.
Even with the small antenna these devices come with, I can pickup TPMS signals from the cars on the nearby streets, and that's with the antenna indoors.
There are a lot of ways to satisfy your hope, many of which I suspect you would consider suboptimal. I hope manifestation doesn’t work.
I guess my point is, you can't hide yourself from the government this way. From some random third party, sure.
For me the utility in having a cell phone is the convenience. If my car breaks down or if I get a page on my 1-way pager that I deem important enough to call back then giving a random datapoint of my location is a conscious decision that I can make. This is vastly different than creating and offering up a record of everywhere I go to the government, the phone company and all of the 3rd parties along the way that hoover up my info as I pass by.
>but also flagged yourself as someone that is hiding something?
Or someone that values their privacy.
>I guess my point is, you can't hide yourself from the government this way.
The government can track you with satellites, helicopters or simply park someone outside your house and follows you every time you go out if they so choose, and there isn't much you can do about it. What you can do is refuse to voluntarily input all of your movements and activities into a massive database that can be accessed, retrieved and data-mined at will.
In the financial sector, I feel like a lot of really good progress has been made with regard to creating artificial forces that strongly encourage proper behavior around PII and other sensitive data. Just take a look at PCI-DSS for a good example of the lengths you could go to in order to protect a customer's assets and/or identity.
The data was never used for enforcement purposes. (if it was.. it wasn't very efficient at all)
I also don’t care how harmless or good the CDC might be to someone. A government entity should not be a using tax payer money to purchase privacy sensitive data of citizens.
With dieases similar to covid, measles, etc .. it's an invaluable tool to be able to determine how, and where infection occured. This allowed for some fantastic studies and finds in Korea. (I.e. https://jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e415 would not have been possible without the phone data)
This was the least expensive and most responsible way to conduct this study. What alternative would you provide? Just not doing it?
An interesting proposal.
Nothing nefarious going on here, right? It's not like they are bypassing constitution here and checking if one visited place of worship, are they?
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/timmarchman/status/15214777908135...
I understand the model, they provide a tracking sdk that app developers embed in their apps and get paid for. But I haven’t found any actual documentation on these sdk’s. Do they buy the apps themselves or reach out directly somehow?
Most people don’t realize mobility data even exists. Let alone what you can do with it.
When things get complicated these narrow-minded institutions will fail us.
And yet general practitioners don't know anything about muscles, nutrition or how the pieces fit together.
Big tech is just chomping at the bit for the government to give them the go ahead to track everyone and enforce a 'papers please' society.
Im using a Pixel too, and you can see the toggle if you go to Settings, then select Google.
Mine is toggled off, and I don’t really know he details of how it works, but it seems like you need to download some official COVID reporting app to enable it.
Google ships features to my phone with every major update. This is just one more--completely opt-in--feature.
How do you know though? Google is constantly tracking your every move by default without you turning anything on.
So even if this feature had an on/off it was more by the grace of Google than by any strongly enforced anti-tracking feature.
They are. And you decided to take issue with a default-off feature instead. Of all the tracking features your phone has, this one seems like the least creepy. It's not like they're "asking consent" for every other feature they ship.
This is a feature that, with govt cooperation , could have led to criminal punishment.
There were already government punishments for COVID in place just not coordinated with big tech.
No we couldn't have. It's never been done in history and is probably impossible to do.
If anyone were in a position to know whether it’s possible, and how to do it, he’d be on the list.
I think, regardless of his history regarding open source, water under the bridge long ago, he is worth taking seriously if we want to be prepared for the next one, which may come soon.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704751/how-to-preve...
But I agree, it's absolutely laughable to think enforced social distancing could ever control a fully airborne disease, already so widespread, and with an R_0 over 4, especially now with the current rate of emergence of immunity escaping variants. Check out BA.4 and BA.5 in south africa right now, both of which seem to elude immunity from BA.1 just 6 months after Omicron's emergence.
(a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach, fish tank cleaner, and horse dewormer (b) the WHO and the CDC decided it wasn't an airborne disease because apparently they were still relying on research from 1949 C.E. (c) the CDC decided not to tell Americans that masks were effective (because they didn't want panic buying) (d) Biden's COVID czar decided to ostrich the whole thing
Now we're just fucked; everyone will get it, the question is how many times and how bad the next variants. And whether we'll ever develop effective treatment for long covid.
And yet rabies has not been eliminated from the wild. Not by a long shot. The cumulative effect of these programs over the decades is to mostly eradicate it from inhabited areas in foxes, raccoons and other species which are prone to human interaction. Actual eradication of rabies in the wild in North America, is essentially unattainable, even if we scaled current programs up massively. Too many skunks slip through the net. Unless we're going to simply sterilize the outdoors, I'm really not sure we could eradicate animal reservoirs for COVID-19.
what? one of these is not like the other
What business does the CDC have with Monitoring for local curfews? Wouldn't curfew monitoring be more the purview of local law enforcement more so than the remit of national health agency. Further did the US actually have hard curfews anywhere?
If you tell people “don’t go to weddings” and people are still going to convention centers you know something is wrong with your method of intervention.
That said, this kind of thing does seem like it has the potential to effectively be an end run around needing a warrant to do this kind of tracking on an individual basis. If it's not allowed for the government to track any particular person without a warrant but they can just buy the tracking data from a brokerage and claim "we didn't do the tracking" - that's a bit problematic to say the least.
I do agree with other posters though that the real crux of it here is that this kind of data should be illegal to have on its own anyways UNLESS ordered by a court to collect it for the purposes of a warrant.
Why are people saying this sort of thing about the CDC? They have proven themselves out-of-control, irrational dictators.
That's a very word-smithed way of saying "looks like they were right".
The whole opinion of roe v Wade was predicated on the fact the government had no right to people's health information:
> In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in McCorvey's favor ruling that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion.
Now we have vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and CDC surveillance.
The Due Process violation is not about government right to health information. It's about the govt not being able to deprive people of things without due process.
Here's the full SC ruling [1]
We've had those for decades.
> vaccine passports
These must not be a federal thing, because I still don't really know what people mean by this. Is it a state thing?
> and CDC surveillance
Private surveillance that the CDC and anyone else can buy. I agree that collecting this info in the first place, let alone selling it, should be very, very illegal.
I've never had to provide proof of vaccination.
What's different about this isn't the presence of mandates, but that it was a novel virus so mandates were applied to (a small set of) adults rather than mainly to kids.
In fact, the set of people to whom Covid vaccine mandates apply is surely way smaller than the set to whom a variety of others do. I'm pretty sure most states aren't requiring Covid vaccination for school attendance, for instance.
Not coincidentally, Roe is about to be a memory too.
Honestly this is the dumbest thing to do in secret. The CDC was supposed to be apolitical and gave that up entirely during the pandemic, and now it appears they are quite horrible at politics.
If the politicians politicize a pandemic, and the CDC's job is to fight disease, then anything the CDC does becomes political by definition. Seems like that's on the politicians.
Ctrl-F "the mobility metrics are"
They made a FOIA request and got the procurement documents which lists use cases such as "Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation" and monitoring "places of worship" both of which have extremely negative connotations.
This sort of dataset gets used in all kinds of twisted ways that aren't limited to footnotes on cute graphs.
Here’s an example https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.02.20234989v...