141–150 of 204 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there were no gatekeepers on this, how much contact tracing fraud and malware would there be?
These would be good problems to have because they'd mean the apps were successful in the first place! Problems are solvable if we have the chance to solve them.
Why wouldn’t the outcome be that people didn’t use contact tracing apps because a bunch of them were scans and malware?
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…
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 coun…
And to be clear, this is not just a problem of the Apples and Googles of the world. Many more face similar issues, starting with the telcos themselves. The point is that location tracing is something that is routinely done for other legitimate reasons, but the recent pandemic suddenly forces everyone to be specific about how and why we allow it.
Did I miss something or are low adoption rates and bluetooth issues the only indicators that decentralized tracking has failed, as pointed out in the article? The lack of statistics about success/failure otherwise seems to imply more of a "we don't know for sure"?
Specifically, it seems that adoption rates are so low as to render the application nearly useless.
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…
The point isn't to figure out where the contacts were. It's to figure out who they were.
This is completely missing what is likely the primary obstacle to adoption, at least in the US. Apple and Google require an entire state to commit exclusively to using a single app. Even though they use a protocol that would easily interoperate across jurisdictions and apps effectively. City governments which could move much faster are unable to do anything. States are on fire dealing with others things. They also al…
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…
Dragnet location use is vastly more justified for pandemic tracing than for law enforcement. I'm not sure how this could set a worse precedent than we already have. Just trading one for the other would be a boon for privacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the Apple/Google mechanism is not useful for surveillance.
It is if you build Bluetooth scanners everywhere in a city and correlate the scan data with other surveillance data, as simple as pointing a camera at whoever passes by a scanner.
The contact tracking system does not add anything that is not present for tracking individuals. What it does provide is for two anonymous individuals to determine if they were in contact with each other for some period of time in the past.
The ability to do surveillance to see if an individual is in a particular place at a particular time is neither aided nor hindered by the contract tracing framework that Apple and Google provided.
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…