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Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

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Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#171

Post by orangecat »

azinman2 wrote: post #90
anoncake wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locking yourself up for fear of a <1% chance of dying is very much a choice.

That 1% depends on a wide variety of contexts. It isn’t 1% for everyone, 1/3% of those who didn’t die seem to have debilitating persistent problems, and even if everything is fine with you, you can pass it to someone who passes it to someone who dies from your unwillingness to act for the greater good. To do anything but protect yourself is fundamentally selfish.

It isn’t 1% for everyone

True. If you're younger (really, under 60) and healthy it's much less than 1%.

1/3% of those who didn’t die seem to have debilitating persistent problems

Unclear if you mean 1/3 of all infections, which is far too high, or 1 to 3 percent, which is possibly reasonable, although again it's going to be skewed towards older and unhealthy people.

even if everything is fine with you, you can pass it to someone who passes it to someone who dies from your unwillingness to act for the greater good

At some point people have to be responsible for themselves. If you're severely allergic to peanuts, then that's something that you have to watch out for; we don't ban peanuts for the general public. If you're at high risk for COVID then you should take appropriate precautions, but it's unreasonable to demand that everyone else be forbidden from seeing their friends and family for months or years.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#172

Post by raverbashing »

Avamander wrote: post #122
raverbashing wrote: post #31

You don't want to install a tracing app for "privacy reasons" fine. Just make sure you don't have any of: Google's location history turned on, any FB app (FB/Instagram/Whatsapp), TikTok, 4sq/swarm, Tinder, Happn, or any app that has fine-grained location permissions.

Ah yes, the waterproof "some bad things are happening, it must mean that this other bad thing happening is also fine"-argument. "Most people infect their devices with malware from the internet, let's all preinstall malware to every device because it has the same end result."

> Ah yes, the waterproof "some bad things are happening, it must mean that this other bad thing happening is also fine"-argument.

Ah yes the good strawman fallacy argument

Funny how the contact tracing app requires no special permissions. None. Every extra data is completely optional.

Sure it is your choice to not install the C.T. app and install other data-hoarding apps but know what you're doing.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#173

Post by corin_ »

petre wrote: post #166
mantap wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this isn't correct. Contact tracing can't work using location data, because it's far too coarse and unreliable to be useful. Too many false positives. The point isn't to figure out where the contacts were. It's to figure out who they were.

This has privacy implications and is ripe for abuse. What then? The gov't forcibly quarantines those people? Displays the info on a public web page so neighbours can bolt their doors shut like it happened in Wuhan? Maybe it's just me but I can already think of a Minority Report kind of scenario.

The Google/Apple concept deals with the privacy implications pretty well.

I may be misremembering details, but the idea is that everyone's phone stores its own database of unique identifiers of other devices its come into close proximity to. Then an alert goes out saying "anonymous device XY123 tested positive", and if my phone has that ID in its list of people who may have been close enough to infect me I'd get an alert, but the alert wouldn't tell me who it was who tested positive, and the central system doesn't know who has come into contact with who, it just knows when someone says "hey, my ID is this and I just tested positive" (which is no worse privacy wise than using your real name when going to get tested).

As to how gov reacts if/when they know someone has Covid... well that debate will exist in any country where there aren't 0 tests taking place, because "what will they enforce on me if they think/know I have covid" is happening more from people who test positive than from contact tracing. So it's a different subject, but frankly anyone who does have symptoms or a positive test should be staying the hell away from anyone out of decency without needing any government enforcement.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#174

Post by jazzyjackson »

usr1106 wrote: post #156
osdiab wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely store location for the majority of users who use Google Maps, their location history is both very accurate and opt-out buried in settings menus. I don’t have numbers on percentages given that Google likely doesn’t share this data, but I feel safe in assuming that less than 5% of Google Maps users have turned off the location history feature.

Many potentially dangereous contacts happen inside where positioning doesn't work. Maybe in a restaurant the location could be inferred because you enter and leave through the same door. But in the subway/metro/underground? Also every high-raise building would create lots of false possitives by people that did not get close.

Google location is still very good in buildings and subways because they wardrive open wifi routers to help triangulate you. So when I'm near a wifi router with a particular MAC address that google has seen before, they've got me.

Agree with you on high rises and false positives, but then again, if air is circulated in the building or everyone uses the same elevators, might be worth notifying them.

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#175

Post by junipertea »

cwhiz wrote: post #152

Contact tracing apps were NEVER going to work. There are numerous fundamental technical problems but those aren’t even worth getting into, because people won’t use this shit. Smartphone contact tracing is an absurd silver bullet pipe dream from a bunch of hammers who see the world as full of nails. It won’t work, can’t work, and will not ever work. How much more effort are people going to waste on this?? Every time t…

Can you name those fundamental technical problems? From my understanding, the problems are adoption and states being slow in implementing the apps. I don’t have any exact numbers, but I would say even with some false positives it will be much more directed unlike testing everyone daily.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#176

Post by anoncake »

azinman2 wrote: post #90
anoncake wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locking yourself up for fear of a <1% chance of dying is very much a choice.

That 1% depends on a wide variety of contexts. It isn’t 1% for everyone, 1/3% of those who didn’t die seem to have debilitating persistent problems, and even if everything is fine with you, you can pass it to someone who passes it to someone who dies from your unwillingness to act for the greater good. To do anything but protect yourself is fundamentally selfish.

> 1/3% of those who didn’t die seem to have debilitating persistent problems

Source? All I've seen so far has been anecdotal evidence.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#177

Post by bluedispatcher »

tzs wrote: post #106
gruez wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant because once you're infected, you give up your daily keys[1], which allow your random ids to be correlated together. [1] technically this is optional, but not doing so also means you're not reporting your infected status to others, which kills the point of contact tracing.

The medical facility that diagnoses you does not get your keys, if I'm understanding the system correctly. They give you a key that you give to your phone, and your phone then uploads the daily keys. Unless your phone includes identifying information with that upload, the daily keys are still anonymous at that point. The hypothetical malicious actor would need to have (1) listened at some location where you were and…

Face recognition would only matter if the adversary was targeting someone specific. There are simpler use cases than that: who was present at a protest for example. Activists could find themselves in a situation where it makes more sense not to get tested in order to avoid correlating their identity to their movements.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#178

Post by closeparen »

bad_user wrote: post #168
closeparen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important part of the NSA problem is that terrorist conspiracies are a largely imaginary boogeyman. The vast majority of its collection is unwarranted. But the pandemic is real, we know that the damage it does is directly related to the effectiveness of contact tracing, and we know that anyone having contacts outside the household is doing an unusual and extremely dangerous thing. This is more like tailing people…

The moment you start seeing regular people as terrorists, that's when you've lost the plot ;-)

Terrorists dream of inflicting as much damage as "regular people" do when they continue acting like regular people in a pandemic.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#179

Post by stevedotcarter »

markdown wrote: post #150
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…

Does your Irish app require the app to be open on iOS?

Not that I’m aware of. The app just reads the data your phone is already collecting.

It’s making use of the api that Apple and Google added to iOS and Android. Which I believe once enabled is using Bluetooth beacons to keep a list of other phones you have been nearby. That’s all done by phone, not the app.

If you test positive, then you are expected to use the app to upload the list of phones you were in contact with. Notifications will then be sent to all those phones through the app.

Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

#180

Post by toyg »

markdown wrote: post #150
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…

Does your Irish app require the app to be open on iOS?

No, reportedly it was the first app to use the Google/Apple framework from the very start, which doesn’t suffer from that issue.
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