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Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

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Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#131

Post by coronadisaster »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #112
quicklime wrote: post #63

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building an…

Idk, maybe Google and Apple could do more, but I thought it was almost a wonder how fast Google and Apple came up with a workable framework.

Probably because they were already using it internally for other purposes.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#132

Post by Despegar »

xorcist wrote: post #115
quicklime wrote: post #63

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building an…

Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact tr…

>They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have.

Apple definitely could not have done this because they don't have this data.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#133

Post by chipotle_coyote »

xorcist wrote: post #115
quicklime wrote: post #63

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building an…

Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact tr…

> It is amusing that the BLE tracing toolkits were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to Google and Apple, the exact entities who already have fine grained location data on most people.

I think they were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to government authorities. Also, Apple makes a fair amount of noise about not collecting fine-grained location data and other PII on their servers; as far as I know, at least, they simply don't do the kind of server-side logging that would let them do the kind of historical reconstruction you're describing in your first paragraph. I'm not entirely sure Google does, either, for that matter, even though they keep a lot more server-side.

(Foursquare, of all companies, could probably do it. But only for a too-small subset of people.)

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#135

Post by jariel »

xorcist wrote: post #115
quicklime wrote: post #63

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building an…

Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact tr…

From personal experience in this industry, the issues are mostly pragmatic, i.e. legal, and then about authoritarian regimes. There are some ideological issues concerning 'personal information' that varies from company to company and we linger a lot about that in the Western press and on HN, but that's really not it.

It's very simple: if your ABC company has the ability to 'trace' people, and you allow 'friendly country' XYZ to use it - then 100% of 'baddie countries' will immediately full court press for access as well, with the possibility of banning your tech if you don't.

And then the political/power haggling ensues: dictators actually do have to worry about popularity, so what would it mean to invalidate all the iPhones in Saudia Arabia ... probably not good, so there's that. On the other hand, being able to 'trace everyone', especially my political enemies is also exetentiayly powerful so ...

I don't know what would happen if this were not the case - if this were 40 years ago, we were not as technically globalised and Apple was just selling to US/Canada, we may see different outcomes.

But as it stands, most governments in the world are 'completely untrustable' with the tech, and so it's almost like it renders moot the question of whether Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, or the US can have it and 'play well'.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#136

Post by bbrazil »

stevedotcarter wrote: post #100

I live in Ireland and our contact tracing app (using Google+Apple tech) seems to be doing well. There was about 1 million install 1-2 days after it launched, currently standing at 1.4 million installs (population is 4.9 million), along with some positive contacts reported: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53525712 It was also donated to open source. https://www.nearform.com/blog/ireland-donates-contact-tracin... W…

Indeed, and it's early days yet.

From the article:

> It also reveals that, whatever the people of Ireland have been told, their app is collecting centralised data on them.

The signup flow has a very obvious and well written opt-in for collection of anonymised data to help track how well the app is working, which was mentioned by the BBC article linked. I don't think people are being mislead.

I personally decided not to enable that, but did give the app my phone number to be shared in the event I'm a close contact.

> it has been in use, it is claimed to have resulted in 91 “close contact exposure alerts”, which is remarkably few.

That they know of, as those users either opted in to the anonymous tracking or (possibly) gave their phone number. It'd be useful to know how the install base per the usual Android/iOS stats compare with the anonymous tracking enablement, but those numbers haven't been shared as far as I'm aware.

Right now our overall case numbers are low enough (around 20 per day) that it's likely hard to tell how effective the app is. However our R is currently estimated at 1.1, so even a little help from the app could help keep us below 1.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#137

Post by kevinpet »

eecc wrote: post #130

Italy’s Immuni wasn’t downloaded enough to be a significant sample; people are too worried about their bloody battery performance and “what if I’m flagged and gub’mint makes me isolate home”. The National Health Service’s effort to run a population wide serological sample was also declined because “what if I’m positive and I need to stay home”. The fucking chemical reagents expired in the meantime. It’s these times w…

Comments like "what if I’m flagged and gub’mint makes me isolate home" makes me think of people who object that the problem is idiot users who don't recognize a clearly superior product. If people don't trust the government, that's a failure of that government.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#138

Post by bbrazil »

jt2190 wrote: post #58

Ignoring the headline, it seems like the article equates quick, widespread adoption of these apps as “success”, and anything else as “failure”. Although it does note: > Conventional contact tracing methods also haven’t been faring well. Despite this, it doesn’t even bother to identify the many reasons tracing apps might not be widely adopted yet, in particular privacy concerns (although it does mention that “draconia…

> Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist?

Speaking for Ireland the app was heavily publicised, and there's even a prominent "Share app" feature in the app itself.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#139

Post by nindalf »

Despegar wrote: post #132
xorcist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact tr…

>They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have. Apple definitely could not have done this because they don't have this data.

Even assuming for a second that Google stores the location of every user (they didn’t store mine), how would they do contact tracing when they don’t have access to data on iOS devices? Even assuming they did, what key would they join on?

But no, a confident blanket assertion is made without providing any evidence.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#140

Post by JamisonM »

Robotbeat wrote: post #73
jt2190 wrote: post #58

Ignoring the headline, it seems like the article equates quick, widespread adoption of these apps as “success”, and anything else as “failure”. Although it does note: > Conventional contact tracing methods also haven’t been faring well. Despite this, it doesn’t even bother to identify the many reasons tracing apps might not be widely adopted yet, in particular privacy concerns (although it does mention that “draconia…

Agreed. And I hate headlines like this that mislead their audience. Headlines must be stand-alone true as >90% of the people who happen to see the headline aren’t going to read the article. A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in. (Which of course becomes self-reinforcing... If the vast majority of people who see the…

" A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in."

That would be an entirely accurate impression, contact tracing apps have a proven track record of not working so far. That one contributing factor is the lack of buy-in in the population does not detract from that point.

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