Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

blog.xot.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 125 posts

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#111

Post by kujaomega »

chispamed wrote: post #108
kujaomega wrote: post #103

In my humble opinion, this platform aims to track if people had got contact by bluetooth with other people that might have the virus. The virus can remain in surfaces up to 3 days( https://www.immedicohospitalario.es/noticia/18729/new-corona... ). With bluetooth you can not track the surfaces, so the ratio of false positives and false negatives will be high. The best way to stop possible infections remains in individ…

That's a logical fallacy. This app not being able to prevent all possible infections and having false positives / false negatives does not automatically mean that its sole purpose is to track users. There are multiple scientific studies that support the use of an app as one of many measures for ending the lockdown which already takes away many basic rights at the moment. Even though viral RNA can be found on surfaces…

> all studies so far point in the opposite direction

Do you have any source of this information?

> close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days

What's the source of this information?

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#112

Post by Macha »

jmull wrote: post #92
mpweiher wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not just turning something on though. This system doesn’t do what the author is talking about. It’s decentralized, opt-in, and transparent. The government would have to force Apple and Google to make it centralized, automatic, and secret. In others, force them to make a completely different platform.

The other thing is lets say the government decided to bring in this system and Google/Apple didn't give any feedback.

Then they just get a contractor to build an app that just broadcasts "I am Bob and I am at " to nearby people and a central server. suddenly you have something way more open to abuse

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#113

Post by chispamed »

kujaomega wrote: post #111
chispamed wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a logical fallacy. This app not being able to prevent all possible infections and having false positives / false negatives does not automatically mean that its sole purpose is to track users. There are multiple scientific studies that support the use of an app as one of many measures for ending the lockdown which already takes away many basic rights at the moment. Even though viral RNA can be found on surfaces…

> all studies so far point in the opposite direction Do you have any source of this information? > close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days What's the source of this information?

For the second point, take a look at these studies:

Ferretti et al. (2020). Quantifying dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests that epidemic control and avoidance is feasible through instantaneous digital contact tracing. Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie...

Ganyani, Tapiwa, et al. "Estimating the generation interval for COVID-19 based on symptom onset data." medRxiv (2020). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v...

The first study also touches on the point of transmission through surfaces which they argue should be at the very most 10% of all cases but probably less and a German virologist who's one of the leading experts in coronaviruses, Prof. Dr. Drosten, said that he and many others believe that surface transmission is almost negligible: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript162.pdf (in German).

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#114

Post by stjohnswarts »

grey-area wrote: post #74
jmull wrote: 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.

Yes but previously they would have needed a law passed to do such monitoring without a warrant, now people are just volunteering it with the drive by apple and google to publically and very openly track who you hang out with, where you're going, where you've been and then enthusiastically sharing it with the government. This is the softening up. Once covid is over in a few months or years they will be like "well look at all the good we can do, now we can use it to track all sorts of diseases, crime patterns, what you had for dinner and how that ties in with your other webs of interaction TO HELP MAKE YOU SAFER"

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#115

Post by matt_smith123 »

jmull wrote: post #96
GordonS wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re missing the main point: if the government can do this, it will, independent of this contact tracing platform How? I'm not talking about getting a warrant to infiltrate a single suspect's device, I'm talking about mass surveillance. They need a means, and depending on how they approach it, they need to soften up the public so they are willing. Apps like this provide a means - maybe they don't collect everythi…

We’re already at the bottom of the hill of that slippery slope argument. Nearly everyone already carries the tools of mass surveillance around with them everywhere they go already. What may or may not be partially missing (don’t forget, cell towers are already tracking everyone’s general location and governments can get that data in various ways) is the software and backend systems to collect that data and make it av…

A key difference for me is that it is way easier for the government to get a company or individual to give up keys or data than it is to get them to write the code to gather data in the first place. I'm sure there are those in government that are quite pleased that Apple and Google are doing it willingly.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#116

Post by stjohnswarts »

epistasis wrote: post #18

> 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…

There are legal/ethical barriers though between google and apple sharing this stuff with the government. This is an effort to soften up the populace on "what a good thing" tracking and activity sharing with the government is and why next it should be permanent rather than just an emergency tactic. "Imagine all the good we could do if we had all the data of things you buy, where you go, who you interact with and provided that to government in a package with a bow on it". Kind of like the sunset clause on the "Patriot Act" which keeps getting renewed and is a travesty.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#117

Post by Fnoord »

jmull wrote: 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…

I'm not sure why you need to be so condescending in a healthy discussion like this.

> 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 contact tracing platform. These assume the government already has deep, control of the details of the operating system.

If your system has one RCE, you don't care about another one because it already has one? Perhaps you can work around the one, mitigating it? Also, "the government" (any in the world) can ask Google or Apple to share the data of a suspect. As they're not a one way hash, that is possible. Furthermore, an attacker can certainly gather the Bluetooth addresses and correlate these to one way hashes. If the API is public, they can correlate these hashes and detect which Bluetooth addresses got the disease. Together with the location, even an outsider can learn more about this issue.

Also, lets not forget there's recently an RCE in Bluetooth on Android (which many people still run with unpatched), and the problem of iOS not working with Bluetooth when the application isn't open on the foreground with screen open.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#118

Post by stjohnswarts »

yuy7878 wrote: post #57

This seems to misunderstand or dismiss a lot of important details about the proposal. > The current specifications allow phones to learn when and where they were in contact with another device. That's over simplifying it massively. First the spec clearly states that no location data is recorded, since the location is not necessary for the application of contact tracing. > By pushing a button on one phone, by reportin…

You trust them to not log that information when it is all clearly available to them? You are trusting apple, google, and the US government to not do the wrong thing? Or to not use this as a stepping stone to a permanent and more invasive "feature" to insure your safety?

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#119

Post by stjohnswarts »

avra wrote: post #36

I'm afraid someone has to tell the author that what is already possible is worse than the concerns raised here. This technology is actually an effort to not use the available methods that would ignore privacy.

The author (and anyone half awake about what their phone is) is well of aware of the technology. Currently there are laws and legal standards that stop a lot of this. This is an attempt to soften up the public to the idea of having every movement, purchase, contact, and interaction go into a database and then passed on to the government when they don't do necessarily what the government wants. In the walled garden of helping with covid there is no doubt that this could do good. Outside those walls are governments hoping such tactics soften up the populace to the idea that this is actually a good idea for everyday life.

Re: Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform

#120

Post by stjohnswarts »

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

This article isn't about covid, this is about the longer term prospects of having corporate-government cooperation in sharing data about your day to day activities, contacts, any other information on your phone and building infrastructure to make that even easier than it is now. AND it will be deeply buried into the operating system and not a simple app that can be uninstalled, it will become integral to it's operation and always on. They also seem to have no plans mentioned about ripping its hooks out after the covid emergency is over, or a 3rd party monitoring what they are up to or the source code being open for investigation for 3rd parties.
Post reply on HN