Live data from Hacker News

Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

blog.xot.nl

71–80 of 125 posts

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#71
Improving healthcare outcomes is crucially important at the moment, and technology can help with that.

That said, there's risk in globally deploying platform-level technology changes which could be difficult to roll back and are not held democratically accountable.

It may be worth considering time-limits on rapidly-introduced technology changes like this. We cannot always anticipate all the side-effects of technology, and if we do need to introduce them suddenly, we should be thoughtful and deliberate about evaluating their effect as we do.

It seems apparent that Apple and Google are the entities holding the reins on this particular implementation. Yes the technology is opt-in; but that could be seen as a way to make a potentially bitter pill palatable for both citizens and their governments.

After a global recovery, imagine what the world might be like if nearly all daily interactions between people with Android or Apple smart devices have to be assumed known to their local authorities (including in locations with repressive regimes).

Perhaps that would appear acceptable, under some circumstances, to some people in some cultures. I think it'd be hard for almost anyone to quantify.

I'd suspect that an environment like this would lead to a significant loss of privacy and a resulting chilling effect in the types of activities and relationships that people build.

Even if that's a pessimistic outlook, it may be worth questioning whether two corporations from a single country should have the power to effect such large changes without at least constraining their effect to the duration of the COVID-19 crisis.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#72
Maybe the best thing to come out of this crisis is a chip in the armor for the privacy-over-everything crowd.

This is a particular problem in the US where in the name of "freedom" people feel entitled to do whatever they want. I've come around to thinking that this is little more than a mass rationalization for selfishness and cruelty.

I think back to things like the Trump administration separating children from parents in detention facilities, a measure so cruel that it was one of the few times such a policy of this government has been reversed. This has long term harm on children (seriously, google it) but yet it's justified by some out of a sense of fear that somehow these immigrants are criminals or just "stealing their jobs" or "jumping the queue" when most are just trying to escape pretty terrible situations.

Honestly, I see more outrage over animal cruelty than I did from removing three year olds from their parents.

In years passed, we as a society endured a lot when required. In the World Wars, there was rationing and a lot of sacrifice to support the war effort.

But we've somehow transitioned into a society where we don't want to do anything for anyone. And we want to call that "liberty".

What we have here is something that may help tracking contacts for a disease we need to fight. That seems like a good thing to me. I don't give an F that some privacy nut may think "but the government might use this to track us".

Not every surface is a slippery slope.

Just like we had curfews, rations, shortages, blackout blinds and so forth in WW2 and now we don't. Not everything has to get worse.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#73
post #52

This guy is wrong about the Apple/Google contact tracing program. As created, it’s opt-in only and does not report matches to a central authority. This guy says, yeah, but the gubment could abuse the tracing mechanism for things besides an epidemic, force your phone to report matches centrally, and force the removal of the opt-in part of it. ...except, if a government can pull those off, they don’t need this new cont…

First, you make some good points but you could have made them without rudely characterizing the author ("...but the gubment could.." etc.)

Second, the author is not wrong - when you build in tracking at such a deep-level it is open to abuse. Read the authors bio, he is not a naive techie. This is an area he has strong background in and deep technical knowledge.

Maybe this is the path forward, but Apple and Google appear to be rushing into this without considering the larger picture.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#74
post #52

This guy is wrong about the Apple/Google contact tracing program. As created, it’s opt-in only and does not report matches to a central authority. This guy says, yeah, but the gubment could abuse the tracing mechanism for things besides an epidemic, force your phone to report matches centrally, and force the removal of the opt-in part of it. ...except, if a government can pull those off, they don’t need this new cont…

Also, the government already has this capability in place, they can track and bug individuals and groups via telecom networks.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#75
post #39
post #4

The technology used for this is the same as for locating your lost device and takes care of privacy in a very smart way, more info: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet... "Apple says an elaborate rotating key scheme will soon let you track down your stolen laptop, but not let anyone track you. Not even Apple."

I'm sorry if a one word dismissal is too confronting for those who know absolutely nothing about what has been going on in dragnet surveillance in silicon valley. But see all these words I'm writing? They don't change the fact that it is impossible to be cynical enough about such fatuous claims. You'd have to be stunningly ignorant to give them more than a second of credulous thought. Apple are not the good guys or a…

If Google or Apple wanted to track the movements and activities of everyone using an Android phone or iPhone, they would just do it. They wouldn’t need to publish an API and wouldn’t need to tell you about it. They could just do it and we might never know.

So this has nothing whatever to do with trust of Google or Apple tracking us, it’s about trusting what data they share and expose via this API for virus contact tracing. That’s it. That’s why the concerns of the linked article, and yours, while possibly valid in a themselves are completely irrelevant to this specific issue of virus contact tracing.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#76
post #52

This guy is wrong about the Apple/Google contact tracing program. As created, it’s opt-in only and does not report matches to a central authority. This guy says, yeah, but the gubment could abuse the tracing mechanism for things besides an epidemic, force your phone to report matches centrally, and force the removal of the opt-in part of it. ...except, if a government can pull those off, they don’t need this new cont…

There's quite a difference between either forcing Apple and Google to build such a feature, which seems hard, vs. just forcing them to turn an existing feature on.

Same for turning such a feature on surreptitiously vs. installing such a feature surreptitiously.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#77
post #32

Moxie Marlinspike has an interesting analysis on this: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1248707315626201088

He objects to two things: 1. Doing it globally would require download of too much data, thus (contra promise of the spec) location data will have to enter. However, from what I can tell, that could be very coarse data, on the level of country and/or time zone (thus, not even necessitating access to GPS location data). I don’t see it as a major problem. 2. The “prank” danger: someone just pressing “I’m infected” for f…

> The “prank” danger: someone just pressing “I’m infected” for fun.

How about you can only check the "I'm infected" box if your phone is near the phone of a health worker?

Another idea is that you get a code in the mail from the hospital which you have to enter in the app.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#78
> The police could quickly see who has been close to a murder victim: simply report the victims phone as being ‘infected’.

> A company could install Bluetooth beacons equipped with this software at locations of interest (e.g. shopping malls). By reporting a particular beacon as ‘infected’ all phones (that have been lured into installing a loyalty app or that somehow have the SDK of the company embedded in some of the apps they use) will report that they were in the area.

I see these as possible exploits indeed. But the points are a bit confusing. I would love for the police to be able to stop a serial killer from killing more people. But they will do by exploiting a COVID-19 contact tracing app? And we will be mad at them?

> Some might say this is not a bug but a feature, but the same mechanism could be used to find whistleblowers, or the sources of a journalist.

It's been some time since I read Snowdens' Permanent Record, but I don't remember him getting in close contact with journalists to hand over information.

> If you have Google Home at home, Google could use this mechanism to identify all people that have visited your place.

That's the reality already.

> Jealous partners could secretly install an app on the phone of their significant other, to allow them to monitor who they have been in contact with. Overzealous parents could use this spy on their children.

Maybe drill down a bit into your relationship and figure out the core issue.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#79

> 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 locati…

Generally I agree that location tracking is already relatively widely done, and the Apple/ Google protocol makes reasonable efforts to preserve privacy.

I do share some caution, however -- tracing 'personal contacts' by BTLE is likely much more personally specific, and hence significantly more intrusive, than just location.

If such mechanisms became more generally available they would likely become used as part of the machinery of repression in states such as China. Or everywhere (depending on our future).

Location is fairly imprecise as to social contact, but I guess the concern would be that this will be accurate enough to track dissenters, find their contacts, and accuse/ imprison you.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#80
post #47

Moxie Marlinspike has an interesting analysis on this: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1248707315626201088

Published keys are 16 bytes, one for each day. If moderate numbers of smartphone users are infected in any given week, that's 100s of MBs for all phones to DL. That seems untenable. It's a lot, but untenable? If 300 million report as infected, that's 4.8 GB, coincidently the size of a DVD. So 2 hours of Netflix, 1 hour at 4k. Very easy to cache this data close to the edge, too.

> Published keys are 16 bytes, one for each day. If moderate numbers of smartphone users are infected in any given week, that's 100s of MBs for all phones to DL.

> That seems untenable.*

> It's a lot, but untenable? If 300 million report as infected, that's 4.8 GB, coincidently the size of a DVD. So 2 hours of Netflix, 1 hour at 4k. Very easy to cache this data close to the edge, too.

Just doing the math here, assuming a perfectly efficient wire protocol was used, each infected person would amount to (16 x 14 = 224 bytes) of data to be transmitted.

Assuming we see 150k new cases per day, worldwide (worldometers is reporting 100k new cases per day as the peak, and let's factor in 50% margin), this would be 33.6 MB of data per day.

Since you only need to transmit that day's data rather than the full database, a very basic sync protocol could be used here - the phone simply stores the sequence number of the last identifier handled, and it can be given subsequent data. This could even be done with a static (and thus cacheable) server if cases are chunked sequentially into 1MB chunks, and addressed by filename based on the last case ID.

For clarity here, case ID would be simply be the sequential number that a given tracing ID has in the server-side record, so you only need to fetch data you haven't already checked against.

Post reply on HN