The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
301–310 of 442 posts
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CDC are the least scary people buying this data Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you? I don't…
>and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions Do you think the average American knows more about these issues than the CDC? If so, how did they go about getting their knowledge?
Trial and error. The velocity of information exchange that happens on the ground from trial and error - compounded by network effects - is far higher than the exchange that is happening in substantially smaller (CDC) groups at the top with slower speed. They don't iterate as fast and have a bias to move slow.
More importantly. Average knowledge is not important. What matters is that exchange happens so that the optimal decision is arrived at and communicated much faster by a large group , even if each individual knows very little information themselves.
This is the same principle that rules over new tech adoption. You don't need to know how to replicate the new tech, or even how to operate it.
You just need to know it works . That's what real (applied?) knowledge is about, at least in the context above.
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#303See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees. What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway polit…
> CDC are the least scary people buying this data Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you? I don't…
> they can have unchecked power by invoking "science".
I find it incredible that people are capable of discrediting the very process that resulted in the platform for their ability to express that.
The ability for you to press a key, have that intent transmitted to a micro-circuit, have that micro-circuit calculate how to display that character on a pixel grid, and see that result on a display is the result of more than a millenia of an intellectual process called "science." The same intellectual process discovered germs in ~1665, or 368 years ago. Very shortly after we discovered germs we realized that isolation would prevent the spread of germs from one person to another.
People who referred to it as "science," chose to discredit/ignore it and put scientists into the situation where they were trying to figure out how to keep a sinking ship afloat. You know, by doing what scientists have always done: drawing facts from real-world data.
But no, let's rather believe that 368 years ago some rotten fellow initiated massive a conspiracy, which millions of "scientists" for generations to come kept secret, so that in the 2020's the CDC could collect cellphone data for a few months and ruin your insurance profile.
Also, HIPAA.
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#304And they wonder why silly conspiracy theories gain traction in the public? Honestly this is the dumbest thing to do in secret. The CDC was supposed to be apolitical and gave that up entirely during the pandemic, and now it appears they are quite horrible at politics.
It wasn't a secret. It's literally on their website with the sources listed. What exactly is secret. The dashboard they have lists the source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mobility Ctrl-F "the mobility metrics are"
Did you even read the article?
They made a FOIA request and got the procurement documents which lists use cases such as "Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation" and monitoring "places of worship" both of which have extremely negative connotations.
This sort of dataset gets used in all kinds of twisted ways that aren't limited to footnotes on cute graphs.
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#305This is an excellent use of the data, a proof that it is worthwhile for the data to exist, and a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy. It actually sounds like the anonymization and aggregation was done pretty well for this. There's no such thing as 100% anonymity, but there are useful levels of anonymity. The fact that we don't have a standardized way of blessing data…
This is not an excellent he just of the data. And the ways that cdc want to use it is proof the data shouldn't exist.
I don't have a problem with the CDC creating an app to collect such data. An app the clearly says what it is used for.
But to collect the data through some other so and decide if someone broke curfew or visited a neighbor? You think that is ok? Pretty much the definition of Big Brother
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#306As a side question, any recommendations on how to fake GPS location in Android, preferably through using Fdroid, LineageOS
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#307See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees. What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway polit…
> CDC are the least scary people buying this data Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you? I don't…
Lots of big words there, little meaning: Everyone wants a say in how people live their lives, including those advertising companies. The CDC actually does know some things better than at least some individuals, because they spend a lot of money on research while the individual, at best.. well, just look around.
I don't see them believing they have unchecked power, or they would ne enjoying their magical empire right now. And I have no idea what specific harm CDC tracking could enable, even assuming they tried?
This was a public health agency recommending the most trivial countermeasures against the worst acute disease afflicting the world in a century. A three-year old with a LEGO understanding of germ theory and bodily fluids would come up with masks and staying away from other people. As the pandemic ends, so do all countermeasures, and life rapidly returns to normal. It is utterly insane to see this sequence of events as anything but the most obvious, predictable, harmless, working-as-intended storyline.
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#308This was mentioned in April 2020 ish and no one blinked an eye. It was showing how much people left their houses, how far out did they travel to, did they participate in entertainment venues, did they eat out etc.
The data was never used for enforcement purposes. (if it was.. it wasn't very efficient at all)
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
>... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex? The mafia is easy. Pay them and they DGAF what you do. Creepy ex is more or less a non-issue because any threat of violence one person can bring can be matched by another one person. It's the police, terrorists and other well resourced but potentially capricious organizations (like…
Those horrors in history were created through the combination of good intentions (also integral to the best of human history), and the dehumanization of subgroups. What exactly do you fear from the CDC, and who do you fear they will do it to? Not just a challenge, a genuine question.
The holocaust had decidedly not "good intentions". No, not even by its own definition, and definitely not in the sense the term is constantly abused as some magic bullet to refute any position that is otherwise unassailable.
Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders
#310Time to go back to a non-connected Garmin GPS while in the car and slip my phone into a mesh bag when not in use :( So glad I don't own a newer car with a cellular modem built into it. Hope I can die and be buried with my current "dumb" cards.
You better rip out your TPMS since those can be tracked. Same with anything that has bluetooth since those are widely tracked on highways for monitoring traffic flows. Oh and license plate readers, not sure how you block those. Can you live a cash only life as well since credit cards are obviously tracked. Do you own a home? Is it in your name or did you set up an LLC to purchase it? I'm not trying to be a jerk, just…
TPMS is fairly difficult to track. You need to be either very close (inches/feet) or have a very high gain antenna (which means you have to aim it, can't get signals from every direction) plus they don't transmit continuously.