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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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it’s potentially rife with abusive power. And we need to make sure that this is a very temporary thing (admittedly it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle). That said, you can’t advertise to the dead. There’s a very real need here, and some governments are off doing this on their own anyway. I do believe that at least Apple and Google combined can come up with a solution that has some amount of privac…

> admittedly it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle On iOS, entitlements?

I meant that once this capability is out there, people will point to it and say “see it can be done. Now do this, it’s law.”

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

#104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the individuals can’t be personally identified, yes.

They always can.

You could work with rotating anonymous uuids. 1. You log which uuids you see. 2. When someone is tested positively, you add the list of uuids you used to a public list (run e.g. by the government) 3. Clients fetch updates to the list and compare it to the logged uuids and alert the user if there is a match.

This way the government could not identify individuals, and individuals would be in control.

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

#105
post #85

Wait what.. apple and google devices can ping over bluetooth? Clearly an apocalipse sign

BLE works between IOS and Android, why wouldn’t it? It’s a standard 2.4Ghz radio protocol.

The thing created here is a standard BLE characteristic that says I’M PERSON X and your phone is always looking for PEOPLE and recording when it sees them... then uploading that to Google and Apple.

You can decide for yourself if a contact recording system could ever be abused.

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

#108

This is huge. A limiting factor has been iOS not being able to (on purpose, for privacy, and battery life) do BLE scanning (edit: or advertising, thanks Slartie) in the background. I imagine this will enable that for specific apps, and I have high confidence privacy will be well-implemented by Apple's involvement (edit: see tastroder's comment for technical docs). Having a single, well-designed spec for Bluetooth adv…

> I have high confidence privacy will be well-implemented by Apple's involvement

oh yeah! let's blindly trust closed source solutions for privacy and security. This have worked so well every single time in history!

I guess it will be doubly safe if we blindly trust the company that previously saved plain text location data for every app to see.

geez. i know people here invest heavily on APPL, but c'mon. Keep at least a little bit of common sense in the comments!

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

#110

Promising opt-in is a bit disingenuous. These tech giants are creating a technological capability. Whether or not it is opt-in, opt-out or mandatory is then decided by governments, now and in the future. This is of course nothing new. But it's worth noting considering how high the tolerance for extremely intrusive government action currently is and how extremely weak any resistance is bound to be. I'm not saying I'm…

Do you really think that this feature has drawn a line in the sand where previously they couldn't track you and now they can?
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