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Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

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Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#11

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

olgs wrote: post #9

Looks like it was inspired by the TraceTogether app built by the Singapore Government and recently Opensourced. https://www.gov.sg/article/help-speed-up-contact-tracing-wit... https://github.com/OpenTrace-community

> Looks like it was inspired by the TraceTogether app built by the Singapore Government and recently Opensourced.

Not really. This is based on the TCN approaches by Covid-Watch, Co-Epi and DP-3T (submission to PEPP-PT). TraceTogether fundamentally functions very differently.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#12

Post by blhack »

The interest in "privacy" around contact tracing seems like a ship that sailed a long time ago to me. Verizon etc all already have this data, and it isn't "private", and so does uber, lyft, and every other overly-aggressive-permission-askning-app that anybody has ever installed.

Privacy is really important: but we lost it all a long long time ago. Maybe saying "well now we can do a good job of contact tracing" is at least some good coming out of that loss of privacy. I just hope we don't end up wasting time trying to make the contact tracing "private" as if by doing otherwise we'd be giving something up that we didn't already give up long ago.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#13

Post by JoshTriplett »

nerdjon wrote: post #7
hprotagonist wrote: post #5

it is just shockingly important that we come out of this _without_ a dystopian nightmare of a surveillance state. That apple's involved in this is hopeful -- their earlier work on anonymizing Maps.app directions is well worth thinking about here. tl;dr your route is broken up into n chunks, each chunk gets a uuid that isn't tied to your handset, and so serverside nobody knows where Bob's Iphone just asked to go. [0]…

I am hoping that Apple being involved will keep this as privacy respecting as it reasonably can be given what it is doing. I am generally someone that takes privacy very seriously, I mostly avoid Google products and others for this reason. But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all don…

> But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all done, and preferably the code removed completely.

Any right you're willing to give up now, you've demonstrated a willingness to give up. You won't get it back. Either it'll remain lost forever, or it'll be used as evidence for a future proposal to take it away permanently (rhetoric: you agreed to it for X, and clearly any person who isn't morally bankrupt values Y over merely X; you're not morally bankrupt are you? And the need for Y will never go away...).

By all means, let's carefully give people tools to supplement their memory, to help people voluntarily notify others who need to be tested. Let's not, however, make that information available to anyone other than the owner of the device.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#14

Post by tcd »

lalos wrote: post #8

It just takes one erroneous logging call in the wrong place and all this niceness goes away. Hopefully we don't get a headline in the future of "Bug found with contact tracing app, we actually had access to everything but we're sorry and we'll fix it". Not entirely against this work, it will provide benefit but let's hope for the best.

This is why it'd be nice for the APK/installable file to have a hash that can be verified against an open source version. In theory someone should spot anything that doesn't look right.

But that can't/won't undo the effects of something being called "private" being exposed not to be afterall...

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#16

Post by nerdjon »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #13
nerdjon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hoping that Apple being involved will keep this as privacy respecting as it reasonably can be given what it is doing. I am generally someone that takes privacy very seriously, I mostly avoid Google products and others for this reason. But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all don…

> But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all done, and preferably the code removed completely. Any right you're willing to give up now, you've demonstrated a willingness to give up. You won't get it back. Either it'll remain lost forever, or it'll be used as evidence for a future propo…

I mean, I agree to a point.

The problem is, what's the better option right now. Clearly the measures that are being taken are not actually working, people are still being infected and the ability to track the person you happen to walk past or stand next to waiting for your pickup.

I am conflicted about this... but as of right now I also feel like its necessary.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#17

Post by maxerickson »

jefftk wrote: post #10

> would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in I don't see how this can work unless it gets very high distribution. I wonder if local governments might do something where the shelter-in-place orders are lifted for some categories of people conditional on running the app?

Depends on how you define "work".

To get to 0 you need very high participation.

Even modest adoption will have some impact on the rate of spread.

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#18

Post by harrygeez »

justusthane wrote: post #4

Pretty good illustration of how private and secure contact tracing can work here: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ Not sure whether that's what this implementation would look like.

The problem with doing any sort of effective contact tracing requires special APIs for iOS and Android because newer versions of both OS disallow background communication and location gathering

Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology

#19

Post by tcd »

blhack wrote: post #12

The interest in "privacy" around contact tracing seems like a ship that sailed a long time ago to me. Verizon etc all already have this data, and it isn't "private", and so does uber, lyft, and every other overly-aggressive-permission-askning-app that anybody has ever installed. Privacy is really important: but we lost it all a long long time ago. Maybe saying "well now we can do a good job of contact tracing" is at…

Right. But it's not like they're going to "just" announce that.

"Hey everyone - so yeah, we're using all your data you're willingly providing all these apps on your phone, like location, contacts, camera...So thanks for helping...Okay, bye!".

But you're right. Every day there is so much information from the spies we carry around with us as they communicate that it'd be unfathomable they're just "ignoring" all of this information.

The chances are in some privacy policy it says they can share that data with their "partners" which silently gets back to the government.

Just use what you already have, what we already know you have, and if it saves lives then at least it was put to good use.

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