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Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

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Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#11

Post by Reason077 »

bronzeage wrote: post #2

They are trying to prevent both millions of deaths and and worst economic collapse in modern age. Privacy isn't as important. Fight this thing when corona-virus is over.

Surely this technology has many useful applications beyond just the pandemic. It could be used to trace the networks of terrorists, the associates and contacts of criminals, child pornographers, anti-government insurgents, political opponents, environmental protesters...

Once governments have these tools, they will want to keep them around.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#12

Post by bronzeage »

jchristian- wrote: post #7
bronzeage wrote: post #2

They are trying to prevent both millions of deaths and and worst economic collapse in modern age. Privacy isn't as important. Fight this thing when corona-virus is over.

This is exactly the kind of dumb mentally the government wants, and you fell right into the trap. They always use situations like that to push bad stuff that won't be easy to ditch later...

People can't literally exit their houses right now. Much more basic freedoms are taken. If you think ditching that later will be hard, ditching it now when it's desperately needed is impossible.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#13

Post by qwerty123457 »

??? I don't think anybody who catches the coronavirus wants to be anonymous. There is no social stigma.

The problem is exactly the reverse: infected people would gladly tell everybody exposed, but they can't reach them since the virus spreads so easily and the exposed could be delivery drivers, people in the grocery store, etc

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#15

Post by drno123 »

qwerty123457 wrote: post #13

??? I don't think anybody who catches the coronavirus wants to be anonymous. There is no social stigma. The problem is exactly the reverse: infected people would gladly tell everybody exposed, but they can't reach them since the virus spreads so easily and the exposed could be delivery drivers, people in the grocery store, etc

Unfortunately in my country - Croatia - the social stigma exists. While we have a very good situation (total of 1500 cases on population of 4M, with 20 deaths), and we are geographicaly very close to Italy, there were multiple reports of patients’ families being harassed.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#16

Post by dirtyid »

> Or be ready to ditch your smartphone and get yourself a dumbphone.

Isn't this the standard prescription for the extreme privacy conscious individuals anyways? For the rest of us, we can always turn off bluetooth. Maybe this will bring back headphone jacks or replace the standards all together. In the mean time, some of us want security over privacy. Many of us never valued the latter much in the first place.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#17

Post by Tomte »

Reason077 wrote: post #11
bronzeage wrote: post #2

They are trying to prevent both millions of deaths and and worst economic collapse in modern age. Privacy isn't as important. Fight this thing when corona-virus is over.

Surely this technology has many useful applications beyond just the pandemic. It could be used to trace the networks of terrorists, the associates and contacts of criminals, child pornographers, anti-government insurgents, political opponents, environmental protesters... Once governments have these tools, they will want to keep them around.

Terrorists won't voluntarily publish their keys.

That's an important difference. If you want to argue against Covid contact tracking, at least do it reasonably.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#18

Post by epistasis »

> However any decentralised scheme can be turned into a centralised scheme by forcing the phone to report to the authorities that it was at some point in time close to the phone of an infected person.

If the system was different, it would be bad?

This is a slippery-slope argument that I do not find compelling. The amount of surveillance that this is supposedly guarding against--govt tracking of an individual's location--is already possible with no changes to any system.

It is no more slippery a slope for raw unscrambled BTLE identifiers to be reported to a centralized system. I don't think that the encrypted system makes it any easier in the least.

These devices that we carry everywhere are huge privacy concerns, but I don't think this author is even warning about the right things. Does the author even know the amount of location tracking going on in stores, currently? The amount of data that is sold back and forth with no user knowledge or understanding?

The concerns raised here ignore the much worse reality that already exists!!

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#19

Post by simonw »

quezzle wrote: post #6

There’s always ALWAYS some tech extremist who can never see the good, can only EVER see the dark shadows, the spooks, the spies, the nefarious dark forces. For these guys it’s all a matter of sticking by their extremely dogmatic “principles”. Wouldn’t matter if god himself turned up to do good deeds for all, they’d condemn his omnipotent presence for its ability to spy and break privacy. They’ll always come out at ti…

One of the things I've learned over the past ten years is that those "tech extremists" were way more right than I had ever expected.

In this particular case, I'm leaning towards "this is worth it if the alternative is economic oblivion for billions of people" - but this guy's about page is enlightening: he's not some random commentator, this is very much his field.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#20

Post by sischoel »

drno123 wrote: post #15
qwerty123457 wrote: post #13

??? I don't think anybody who catches the coronavirus wants to be anonymous. There is no social stigma. The problem is exactly the reverse: infected people would gladly tell everybody exposed, but they can't reach them since the virus spreads so easily and the exposed could be delivery drivers, people in the grocery store, etc

Unfortunately in my country - Croatia - the social stigma exists. While we have a very good situation (total of 1500 cases on population of 4M, with 20 deaths), and we are geographicaly very close to Italy, there were multiple reports of patients’ families being harassed.

In that case, the number of cases might be much higher, as people try to hide their sickness in order to protect themselves or their relatives.
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