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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

#121

Post by pat2man »

petedoyle wrote: post #79

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…

While background scanning is limited you can key off iBeacon devices via the location framework. This allows your app to wake up when certain devices are near.

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

#122

Post by ddmma »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #105
ddmma wrote: 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.

Sorry for that but sharing files in between iOS or Android wasn’t possible, that is my point

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

turdnagel wrote: post #110
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #100

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?

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by pat2man »

nielsole wrote: post #104
dependenttypes wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah thats pretty much how the spec works. But with key pairs instead of UUIDs.

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

#125

Post by simonsaidit »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #116
jedberg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have the shiny button. They can compel cell phone companies to give this data to the government already, without you knowing about it. At least this way you will get some control of the info and you'll know what was collected and have control of it's disclosure (for now). In other words, this is no worse than what the government is already capable of, it just makes it easier for you to share the data wit…

> They can compel cell phone companies to give this data to the government already Bluetooth has a quite small range, which may give higher tracking precision (to anyone receiving the signal) than the data cell phone companies have.

The alternative would be GPS which some governments are looking at now. It might give higher precision with a grid of location data to enhance it, but I would assume the protocol prevents this eg by some randomization of ids?

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

#126

Post by CubsFan1060 »

tengbretson wrote: post #56
CubsFan1060 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read about it? This isn't that.

What part? Deriving location from contact tracing is trivial. The fact that its being discussed as opt-in? If participating in society requires that you "opt-in" then what about it is really opt-in?

The part about how it works. Once you've read that (here's a link: https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...) Can you describe to me how you'd track individuals with it?

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

#127

Post by FartyMcFarter »

This is wonderful news for any surveillance state. As the three-page brief on DP-3T [1] says:

"A tech-savvy adversary could reidentify identifiers of infected people that they have been physically close to in the past by

i) actively modifying the app to record more specific identifier data and

ii) collecting extra information about identities through additional means, such as a surveillance camera to record and identify the individuals. This would generally be illegal, would be spatially limited, and high effort."

If I read this correctly, this means that a government could collect identifier data on a per-location basis and later link this to someone's identity (for example with cameras or by tracking the IP address of uploaded identifiers).

Unfortunately I can think of quite a few entities (e.g. governments) who are not too worried about doing high effort, spatially limited things in order to track people's locations. Saying that this is "illegal" (which is probably not even true in all countries) does not give me confidence it wouldn't happen either.

[1] https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/raw/master/DP3T%20-%20Sim...

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

#128

Post by tastroder »

Geee wrote: post #78

It's quite horrible if it becomes a standard API. What a gold mine it is for ad business to be able to tell which groups of people are together. It can be used to track 'idea spreading' as well.

The whole point of this is to not enable these abuses, see https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...

The nefarious ad actor can do far more with the existing stack.

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

#129

Post by Slartie »

petedoyle wrote: post #79

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…

The even bigger obstacle was apps not being able to broadcast beacon signals while they are in background. You could devise workarounds for the scanning problems, but this particular problem of having to be able to continuously advertise your beacon signals did not have a workaround AFAIK. The "workaround" was requiring people to have the tracing app active in foreground all the time, which obviously sucks from a UX perspective and means nobody will do it.

That's why this involvement is really huge and welcome! And besides clearing out existing arbitrary API limitations, Apple's involvement in potential protocol design for such tracing technology is a welcome addition in my view as well, because in contrast to Google, Apple at least earned a modicum of trust when it comes to putting the privacy interests of their customers first.

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