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CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

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Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#311

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

KerrAvon wrote: post #106
Enginerrrd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was probably a window in time when cases were less than a few thousand or so when such a thing could have been possible. That's the real game in fighting emerging diseases. Early detection, identification of reservoirs and rapid vaccine development and aggressive isolation and ring vaccination if possible. But I agree, it's absolutely laughable to think enforced social distancing could ever control a fully airb…

Sure, it would have originally been rational to try to contain it until widespread vaccination could happen. That was no longer an option as soon as: (a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach, fish tank cleaner, and horse dewormer (b) the WHO and the CDC decided it wasn't an airborne disease because apparently they were still relying on research from 1949 C.E. (c) the CDC decided not to…

> (a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach

Never happened.

Boy. I sure hope Biden Admin’s misinformation dept gets out there and puts this one to bed.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#312

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

monksy wrote: post #308

This 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)

I might be in the minority, but I don’t care if it was used to make macoroni art.

I also don’t care how harmless or good the CDC might be to someone. A government entity should not be a using tax payer money to purchase privacy sensitive data of citizens.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#313

Post by sfink »

chrismcb wrote: post #305
sfink wrote: post #199

This 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

If they can identify individual people breaking curfew, then yes that's way out of line. If they can estimate the percentage of people breaking curfew within an entire large city, that seems like important policy input. And there's a huge gray area in between.

In actual fact, I'm not entirely comfortable with the "large city" granularity either. I don't want a city that is majority black to be treated differently using the excuse of their aggregated health data, for instance. I think these types of data collections need to be treated very seriously, requiring justification for specific uses, tracking where it lives and enforcing penalties when it shows up elsewhere. Because these data are going to be out there and used. If they aren't managed responsibly, they'll be sold on the black market and used in completely uncontrolled ways.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#314

Post by bogomipz »

>"The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021."

What business does the CDC have with Monitoring for local curfews? Wouldn't curfew monitoring be more the purview of local law enforcement more so than the remit of national health agency. Further did the US actually have hard curfews anywhere?

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#315

Post by wrycoder »

tdfx wrote: post #134
ChrisLomont wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You are absolutely correct from a theoretical standpoint. Completely neutral, independent medical experts should, on average, make better health decisions than an uninformed populace. The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucr…

You forgot major ties with big Pharma. Beyond the point of corruption.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#317

Post by 7speter »

smileysteve wrote: post #217
version_five wrote: post #100

Earlier 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…

> Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you? Yes? As the CDC's only enforcement mechanisms are generally small teams in tyvek suits with fertilizer sprayers with bleach. Their primary function is public advisement and their employees are civilian. So yes, CIA, FBI, IRS, NSA, military, Homeland security (tsa and coast guard), grb; but also Facebook, apple, Google, at&t.

As far as I know the cdc hasn’t dropped radiation in anyones tea or put a deadly poison on the door knob of anyone’s front door.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#318

Post by ryandrake »

dekhn wrote: post #91
user_7832 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fauci as the saviour in Stockholme Syndrome... Not a downvoter (to your comment, I rarely vote) but does anybody pro-mask/pro-vaccine/pro-lockdown actually consider him a saviour? All I see (as a non American) is folks on the right hating him being considered a saviour... but I don't find a single post glorifying him even on left-leaning reddit.

I'm a democrat who finds fauci completely uninteresting. He's a skillful bureaucrat with health experience but not an effective communicator. I don't think that listening to him and doing exactly what he suggests is the wisest course of action, but it's certainly not the least wise.

The only people who care about Fauci, or even say his name, are the people who need an effigy to burn and a boogeyman to pin all their fears and conspiracies on. To most Americans, he is a semi-remarkable bureaucrat who had a couple of weeks time on TV and managed to get a tiny bit of name recognition out of it. To the right, he's the central puppet master, solely holding the strings of a shadowy global conspiracy by the Deep State to use 5G and vaccines to mind control the world into the New World Order. Look at their forums, he's somehow become this terrifying Bond Villain to these guys. It used to be Hillary, now it's Fauci. They need an evil mastermind to focus on.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#319

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #138
renewiltord wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Don't be obtuse. The Nazis gassed people because they thought that eliminating the demographics they were gassing would lead to a better society. Sure the people at the top knew it was questionable but the guy loading the train had spent a decade reading newspapers full of junk and thought he was deporting undesirables. The American Indians who's culture was systematically destroyed, all those people the eugenicists…

That's a perfectly pointless and tautological argument, then. Because anything anybody ever did was considered by that person to be useful to themselves at that point of time.

It has nothing to do with the cliché about "good intentions", which rests on a theory of using some universally accepted "good" as cover or argument for some action, or even as the true motivation for actions that end up having unwanted side effects.

The Nazis did not use anything like that to advertise the Holocaust. In fact they did not advertise the Holocaust at all: while any thinking German had an inkling, official communications only ever spoke of "resettlements".

There was very little virtue signaling with the Nazis, in other words. Much like their brethren today, they very much knew they were the baddies and embraced that status with a certain sense of "so what?", hence skulls as insignia: it's an open acknowledgement that you reject common concepts of virtue with full knowledge, and that you enjoy using raw power to do so. "Owning the libs" 1.0, so to speak.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#320

Post by sfink »

zdragnar wrote: post #224
sfink wrote: post #199

This 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…

> If you want to maximize privacy here, then let's pass laws to prevent doctors from knowing the gender, age, and weight of any of their patients. I am fine with my doctor knowing this about me. I am not fine with any doctor who does not see me as a patient knowing anything at all about me. > This is an excellent use of the data, a proof that it is worthwhile for the data to exist The use of the data is fine, but as…

>> If you want to maximize privacy here, then let's pass laws to prevent doctors from knowing the gender, age, and weight of any of their patients.

> I am fine with my doctor knowing this about me. I am not fine with any doctor who does not see me as a patient knowing anything at all about me.

I am ok with my doctor knowing there was a 12% chance that I broke curfew during a pandemic lockdown, given my zip code or whatever. I don't think it's a black and white thing. Especially since you can't have the extreme of no data—the data is already out there, in massive quantities, and mostly uncontrolled.

>> a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy

> I don't genuinely don't know that we can have both (informed consent) and (quality data).

Oh, we can't, not anywhere near the optimal balance anyway. Because people. (And therefore governments, and laws, and everything else.) But I guess I still think that whatever crappy balance we can come up with is better than organizations that can make good use out of collections like this sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending there's no way to know certain things that all the bad actors already know because they're willing to buy this stuff on the black market. It leads to dogs and cats living together and people writing really bad run-on sentences like the previous one.

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