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Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

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Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#161

Post by usrusr »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #71

Wow this is bad, I'm sorry to hear it's already mandatory in one German state. I'm really surprised Germany is playing so loose and fast with privacy as they're known to be one of the countries with the strictest privacy laws around. By the way how does this work being mandatory with people that don't own a smartphone??

It's more like playing loose and slow. For a year, all reasonable projects aiming for a pragmatic compromise between privacy and checkin tracking were reliably choked by privacy concerns.

It's hardly surprising that now that opinions are shifting, the only projects remaining are those most lacking in privacy awareness. The aware have long given up.

And opinions are shifting in no small part because unsurprisingly, the ineffective pen & paper tracking that was deployed instead was suffering from quite real privacy problems that weren't theoretic at all (routinely breached not by ssh keys in the wrong hands or some backdoor hidden in the code but by just asking nicely).

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#162

Post by usrusr »

usrusr wrote: post #160
ArmandGrillet wrote: post #36

What was wrong with Corona-Warn-App? Looked amazing compared to ‎TousAntiCovid last year yet I'm learning here that it isn't improved anymore and I haven't seen ads for it anywhere. The differences between German states and the way news are communicated is so complicated, and it's been more than a year that it's like that now. As a French citizen living in Germany I can get vaccinated if I go back to France soon (the…

The CWA is developed under extreme scrutiny wrt privacy. It's really good at what it does, so good that even the CCC gave it it's blessing (despite being made by companies that would traditionally be considered evil empire in CCC, which really puts CCC in a very favorable light for objectivity). But that strength makes it the absolute opposite of move fast and break things.

PS: and I believe that there is hardly a scenario where moving fast even if breaking things is more called for than pandemic response, particularly regarding privacy where most problems are of the kind "if we did that for decades, eventually abusive patterns would develop" - e.g. mass mail voting is fine done a few times, but if it was routine you'd eventually have most ballot forms filled under some form of supervision. On openly privacy-invading tracing method that is so bad that it's clear that it won't survive until after the worst of the pandemic is over might end up being less invasive long term than something that is "so safe that it can become a fixture" (it isn't).

But leaving the fast-moving to those least concerned with privacy is still a recipe for disaster.

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#163

Post by abductee_hg »

german hiphop star smudo has been promoting the luca app in german tv, etc.

- funnily enough the same smudo who was a very vocal "Napster bad!!11eleven" voice back in the day ... however napster would at least meet 2 op the ccc criteria(instead of 0, like luca :)

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#164

Post by SahAssar »

tgragnato wrote: post #154
mjlawson wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immuni is the official contact tracing app for Italy with 10mm downloads.

Which is not "nobody", but it is not even close to the statistical threshold of "enough use, helps prevent the spread of the disease"

Globally yes, but the thing about contact tracing is that it is inherently local. So getting 1/6:th (if we assume most of those downloads are in Italy) of a single country would probably be helpful in preventing spread.

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#165

Post by lordfosco »

euske wrote: post #147

Is there any government contact tracing app that is considered successful by tech people? Japan had a similar problem: its contact tracing app, COCOA, was originally developed by volunteers in open source. Then the government "purchased" the app and subsidized it to some medium IT vendor, which further subsidized it to six (!) other companies. The app has been regarded clusterfuck and failed to support the latest ver…

The official german contact tracing app [1] that has been developed by two major german corporations on behalf of the german government has received quite good feedback from tech-media as well as the CCC.

Similar to other governmentally supported apps this one has been made open-source beginning with the first drafts, is based on the provided framework by Apple and Google, does not store privacy relevant data on centralized servers and even follows the 10 baseline rules the CCC has published.

That actually makes it even more sad that the german government reaches out to the Luca app developers and buys their service for such a huge amount of money - although there is a product that is on par service wise and way better from a privacy perspective.

[1]: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/corona-warn-ap...

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#166

Post by tastroder »

perlgeek wrote: post #68
leipert wrote: post #65

Source code for the app can be found here: https://gitlab.com/lucaapp

... though in the past many developers have complained that the source code didn't seem to be the one from which the app on the appstore was built and/or it was quite out of date.

The former, at the time the gitlab repos for the mobile clients were published they contained code newer than what was available in the app stores.

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#167

Post by Krasnol »

vbsteven wrote: post #100
Krasnol wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know one even worse: health IT. The prices for crappy software/hardware solutions are mind boggling. I guess this is how it is if you just can afford it.

Don’t forget that pretty much all software that touches medical data will have to go through various approval and regulatory processes. Which sometimes take up even more time than actually writing the software. Hence high costs in this industry.

It is true for actual patient touching software/hardware but it doesn't stop there. If the licence for a single scanner the lady on the registration uses to scan your referral sheet is 500€, than it's clear that this is a "because we can" price and not something which would have some real life connection.

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#168

Post by DuskStar »

SahAssar wrote: post #164
tgragnato wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not "nobody", but it is not even close to the statistical threshold of "enough use, helps prevent the spread of the disease"

Globally yes, but the thing about contact tracing is that it is inherently local. So getting 1/6:th (if we assume most of those downloads are in Italy) of a single country would probably be helpful in preventing spread.

It means 1/36 interactions will be recorded by the app, which is almost certainly not enough to move the needle.

Re: Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

#169

Post by crazygringo »

anticensor wrote: post #159
crazygringo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the problem of corruption and kickbacks. I'm certainly not saying companies can't overpay for things, but there is an inherent pressure from competition to incentivize companies to try to pay less, whereas taxpayer-funded government often doesn't experience similarly direct pressure.

Corrupt businessmen are a thing.

When I said it didn't exist, I meant it doesn't exist as a problem at the same scale.

Yes there are obviously employees who embezzle or contractors who defraud, but companies are generally able to police this themselves relatively effectively. It's nothing like government left to its own devices.

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