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The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

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Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#131

Post by stormdennis »

logicchains wrote: post #119
stormdennis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but then I've never passed a counterfeit nor robbed a woman at gunpoint in her home either. Also as I pointed out elsewhere the risk of death a person of color by the hand a black or Hispanic cop is at least as great as by a white policeman

>No but then I've never passed a counterfeit nor robbed a woman at gunpoint in her home either. The majority of interaction with Americans I have is via this site, and I've seen quite a few comments over the years by people who claim to have received bad treatment at the hands of police in spite of doing nothing wrong.

I'm not black but I've been subjected to stop and search on the streets of London. I've been taken aside and put in a room by police while they checked me out on entering the UK only to eventually be told "OK, you can go" at the end of it, no apology. But generally I've found with police that if you're polite and cooperative they are respectful in return. My first boss in the UK, who wasn't white, one of the first things he said to me was to be wary of black people, they have a chip on their shoulder. I was pretty shocked to hear him say that actually.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#132

Post by jlokier »

stormdennis wrote: post #87
logicchains wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hundreds of thousands are dead in Europe from a virus The majority of whom where very old and/or in ill-health and had a 5-10% chance of dying in the next year anyway.

You don't seem to attach much value to the lives of the elderly and those who have underlying health conditions. I presume that's because no one you care about, including yourself, is in that category. That's a pretty callous attitude. At 78 you have about a 5% chance of dying in the next year but if you've lived to 78 then your life expectancy is about 10 years. 10 years thrown away so some people can go on a march…

> they're angry about someone dying.

They're not angry about someone dying!

That's disingenuous, and breaks the basis of your argument.

The problem isn't dying at all, it's why.

They're angry about a murder, which reminds people there are too many murders.

Angry at a murder by a police officer who thought he could casually do so in broad daylight surrounded by onlookers, because he lives in a culture where he expects to get away with it.

Angry at a culture where a police officer can reasonably think he'll get away with it, because they often do.

Angry at the other officers on the scene who went along with it instead of intervening.

Angry at all the other racist murders that keep happening, and systematic racism on a massive scale in general.

That said I thoroughly agree with your point about protecting the elderly. And for that matter, protecting large numbers of young with asthma and diabetes, and conditions nobody knows about because they didn't matter before. (How easily people reduce these things to "just old people" so they can be ageist).

Trouble is, there's a real dilemma over the right and effective things to do. I think there is a deep human social instinct in play. The protests are not about one person dying, or one person being murdered even. They are about a serious systemic problem which undoubtedly results in large numbers of people, more black than not, dying prematurely. As well as a culture problem, which maintains that problem as those with more influence in society treat the problem as unimportant. I would not be surprised if the number of premature black person deaths in the USA, directly or indirectly caused by racism, comfortably exceeds the number of deaths caused directly or indirectly by COVID-19 in the end.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#133

Post by danjac »

jlokier wrote: post #126

Last I read the UK intends to centrally retain proximity-contact data for 20 years. Rather than deleting when it is decided it's no longer needed to deal with the pandemic. The UK has also refused to legally commit to not sharing the data with other government departments such as the Home Office (immigration and policing) and DWP (benefits). So much for data protection and obtaining data for a designated purpose. Wha…

I suspect a certain government advisor, notorious for driving across country during a lockdown as a bizarre form of eye test, wants to siphon private information to data mining companies owned by his friends in order to manipulate future elections. And the GDPR, as far as I am aware, only applies if you are in, or doing business with, the EU, which the UK is no longer part of thanks to the aforementioned government advisor.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#135

Post by jlokier »

logicchains wrote: post #119
stormdennis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but then I've never passed a counterfeit nor robbed a woman at gunpoint in her home either. Also as I pointed out elsewhere the risk of death a person of color by the hand a black or Hispanic cop is at least as great as by a white policeman

>No but then I've never passed a counterfeit nor robbed a woman at gunpoint in her home either. The majority of interaction with Americans I have is via this site, and I've seen quite a few comments over the years by people who claim to have received bad treatment at the hands of police in spite of doing nothing wrong.

To my sibling commenter (because reply stops at this depth):

> I'm not black but I've been subjected to stop and search on the streets of London. I've been taken aside and put in a room by police while they checked me out on entering the UK only to eventually be told "OK, you can go" at the end of it, no apology. But generally I've found with police that if you're polite and cooperative they are respectful in return. My first boss in the UK, who wasn't white, one of the first things he said to me was to be wary of black people, they have a chip on their shoulder. I was pretty shocked to hear him say that actually.

I'm not black either, and I live in the UK.

I've been stopped by police, I've seen others stopped by police, and I've been with people who are stopped by police.

For the most part the interactions have been fine, but I have seen what looked like black folks "hassled" in London which I have not seen happen to white folks. It is just anecdata and may be nothing but random experiences.

For me the most striking difference was on the border between France and Switzerland.

My girlfriend was black; I was white. We were stopped at the border driving across, by men with extremely large guns. I got a cursory skim of my papers, but my black girlfriend had to get out of the car, be detained for a while, have her papers checked other and generally given a hard time. Even though she had a stronger connection to both countries than I did. However we both had UK passports. They basically didn't believe she was a UK citizen, or that she worked for the UN... just down the road!

Eventually they let us drive on, but it was a very striking difference in treatment.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#136

Post by jlokier »

stormdennis wrote: post #96
toohotatopic wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this also true for being killed by a black police officer? If so, please add a reference. Otherwise it's quite expected that in a segregated society, people are killed by in-group members. This would only be different if there is a huge number of lynch mobs. That said, there is another issue hidden beneath 'by a wide margin'. It's also bizarre that there is so much more crime among black people, and that blacks ar…

You cannot draw simple conclusions I believe but still the stats show that Black and Hispanic police are as likely or more likely to kill people of color as white officers https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti... With regard to your second point, you're hinting at something, why don't you spell out your aetiology for the high levels of crime along black people along with your evidence for that…

> Black and Hispanic police are as likely or more likely to kill people of color as white officers

If that's true, it suggests the racism problem is more serious than we thought; that police of all colors may be endemically racist as a group; that it's not just mainly white police.

That said, we don't see black-on-black murders of innocent people so much. This might be due the symbolism of white-on-black murders in broad daylight with onlookers. Or it might not. Regardless, it's all racism if innocent black folks are getting murdered more often.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#137

Post by jlokier »

riffic wrote: post #73

Stop building tools to enable fascists. Has anyone not learned the lessons of history?

I understand those concerns.

But there has been real, high quality progress on handling data in ways that are mathematically designed to conserve privacy and limit surveillance to a specific, socially constructive purpose.

The Google-Apple method is one of those. However, there is a lot of good work being done that is more advanced than that, which alas is not available right now but will be useful in future.

It parallels the high quality progress we have seen in areas like encryption, and in cryptocurrencies.

I think it's completely right to have doubts. E.g. in another of my commments I wrote that I don't trust the UK government's current approach.

But we are, slowly, also building tools to make fascism more difficult as well. If we can persuade the powers that be to use them, and verify that they are.

It may be that if we don't make "good" contact-tracing tools available, someone will make worse contact-tracing tools and force people to use them, on grounds of necessity. It looks like that's already happening, with some countries adopting a central database approach, some countries making it the law to use them (e.g. India), and other countries using newer privacy-oriented contact-tracing approaches.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#138

Post by stormdennis »

logicchains wrote: post #119
stormdennis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but then I've never passed a counterfeit nor robbed a woman at gunpoint in her home either. Also as I pointed out elsewhere the risk of death a person of color by the hand a black or Hispanic cop is at least as great as by a white policeman

>No but then I've never passed a counterfeit nor robbed a woman at gunpoint in her home either. The majority of interaction with Americans I have is via this site, and I've seen quite a few comments over the years by people who claim to have received bad treatment at the hands of police in spite of doing nothing wrong.

Reply to sibling's reply to me. Why do you think she was subjected to that? I would guess it's because of the high levels of illegal immigration into European countries from Africa and many other places, including the trafficking of women for prostitution. It sucks for your gf that she perhaps looked to these policemen like she maybe fitted the demographic somehow but what are the police supposed to do?

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#139

Post by IneffablePigeon »

danjac wrote: post #133
jlokier wrote: post #126

Last I read the UK intends to centrally retain proximity-contact data for 20 years. Rather than deleting when it is decided it's no longer needed to deal with the pandemic. The UK has also refused to legally commit to not sharing the data with other government departments such as the Home Office (immigration and policing) and DWP (benefits). So much for data protection and obtaining data for a designated purpose. Wha…

I suspect a certain government advisor, notorious for driving across country during a lockdown as a bizarre form of eye test, wants to siphon private information to data mining companies owned by his friends in order to manipulate future elections. And the GDPR, as far as I am aware, only applies if you are in, or doing business with, the EU, which the UK is no longer part of thanks to the aforementioned government a…

The GDPR still applies and will continue to by default, as far as I know. After the transition period the UK would have the choice to repeal or change it but I'm not aware of any push to do so.

Re: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

#140

Post by jlokier »

devilmoon wrote: post #121
riffic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about tracking locations, it's about tracking social connections. I'm a skeptic it won't see abuses.

How can it track social connections when the codes are anonymous by default and can be deanonymized only with an OTP code you generate yourself?

If lots of people are pressured to deanonymize, which they are in this case (it's your civic duty!), that's not a very strong system because a lot can be inferred from "gaps" between people that you are linked to in other contexts.

Just like I can avoid using Facebook but they can still, in principle, keep a shadow profile with lots of details about my life, inferred by putting together knowledge from other people. Just like when I joined LinkedIn it already knew who I knew, without me entering anything except my name and email address (that was spooky, I didn't give it contacts or anything). Just like Google knows your personal interests, even if you delete all cookies at the end of every browsing session.

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