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Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

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Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#171

Post by gorgoiler »

People are scared of the privacy implications of tracking. They should be, but they don’t have to be.

If I had any ability to execute ideas I would have made the app using raffle / cloakroom tickets as the metaphor.

Every time your phone sees another phone, they get one of your tickets and you get one of theirs.

Then whenever someone gets symptoms, if their ticket book was pink then the government announces “anyone with a pink ticket, stay inside for a week”.

(With real ticket books, there aren’t enough unique colours for everyone but the tickets do have unique serial numbers.)

https://www.feteandpartygameshire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2...

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#172

Post by arpstick »

Barrin92 wrote: post #167
arpstick wrote: post #90

a government installing a software without notice or consent onto their population's devices is not something a healthy functioning democracy does, it's what a psychotic paranoid despot does. if the Mass Gov truly wants to minimize harm this is the opposite of what needs to be done. all this will do is drive conspiracy theories and deepen a very legitimate mistrust in the institutions that plague the USA (which helpe…

>"if the Mass Gov truly wants to minimize harm this is the opposite of what needs to be done." where is the actual evidence for this? Both Taiwan and South Korea deployed massive, digital tracking efforts to respond to covid often at the cell-provider/ infrastructure level so the entire population was covered whether they wanted to or not. Nothing about this was despotic or paranoid, it was simply the correct, swift,…

defaults absolutely matter, which is why surveillance being the default is deeply troubling to me. I do not care what the justification flavor of the day is, it's not a good trend to normalize. all it takes is another donald trump type figure to abuse this for evil. hell even a 3rd party could if this was implemented poorly, which is an all too common occurrence.

In the USA, nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program, keep that in mind.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#173

Post by sokoloff »

kuschku wrote: post #12
boredpudding wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worrying part is that it was installed without consent.

There’s nothing worrying about that. You get tons of apps installed without consent (including whatever spam your network provider pushes on you). This app can actually save lives without sacrificing any privacy, pushing it to users is something that has no drawbacks. The largest trouble for the German version of the app was that not enough people installed it. Choosing to install it automatically isn’t something nef…

> This app can actually save lives without sacrificing any privacy, pushing it to users is something that has no drawbacks.

This app might have absolutely no privacy leaks; honestly, it’s too early to know that yet. The code is not published; there’s been no public auditing of the backend data handling practices.

Given that, I see drawbacks.

I did not opt-in to the MA one when prompted on iOS (and it did not install [as far as I can tell]).

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#174

Post by [deleted] »

cblconfederate wrote: post #65

Google and apple install tons of software basically without consent (os updates) , so an app being pushed like that is not surprising. It is worrying however that tech people dont seem to realize how great their tools are for totalitarian states , which push apps and spying much worse than this to their subjects. We really need to talk about users owning their devices and their software rather than leasing them. Ther…

[deleted]

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#177

Post by jjgreen »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #168
mnw21cam wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone trusts Google, whether they like it or not. This is the definition of trust that security operations use: A trusts B if B is capable of doing something nasty to A. Google has a heck-load of money. They could pay a disreputable aggregate company to deliver a load of tonne-bags of gravel to my front garden, blocking my car in, and generally destroying the landscaping. I trust them not to do this, and the reaso…

That is a pedantic and useless definition of trust.

To be fair, that's trust in the security sense, fairy widely used in those circles.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#178

Post by streamofdigits »

There should be a theorem that says a society will either drift into trustless oppressive state that imposes a functioning order by force or evolves a dense graph of trust relations where changes improving collective welfare propagate without friction.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#180

Post by fwn »

dstaley wrote: post #156
studentrob wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you opt-in, does it notify you of all the permissions the app will require? - view network connections - pair with Bluetooth devices - full network access - run at startup - prevent device from sleeping

Virtually every non-trivial Android application has these permissions, none of which are even important enough for the system to prompt you for permission. The only interesting one is "pair with Bluetooth devices" which is how the Exposure Notifications system works.

"full network access" is a hugely important permission.

My cynical side believes that the reason for it not being as visible as other permissions is that platforms profit from the ad-driven app model, which itself heavily relies on an apps ability to access the internet.

That could also be why stock roms do not allow users to disable full network access on a per app basis. (...like, for example, the camera permission.)

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