no thanks
Good luck with living in modern society
No thanks.
Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
131–140 of 484 posts
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#132Promising 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…
This functionality is already live in Find My iPhone. iPhones are performing these associations already. The bigger change is Android joining and sharing the data with researchers.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#133Check out the Indian version of the technology out there since a couple of week.
http://jan-sampark.nic.in/campaigns/2020/04-Apr/Arogya/index...
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#134This 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…
Also excited because they can likely push both advertisement and scanning into the BLE chips themselves, letting the rest of the system (CPU, etc) sleep. Big win for battery life.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#135This 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 ident…
I was under the impression that the NSA already was tracking most people anyway?
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would this contact tracing technology help with vote-rigging?
If you can track the detailed movements of voters and connect that to party affiliation you would have complete visibility into meetings, social networks, and up-and-coming politicians, such that you can prioritize suppression efforts on those regions. Similar as a whole to gerrymandering, but imagine key political opponents being shut down "as the data shows a cluster of CV-19 may appear here at this exact date and…
I feel like Facebook is basically already doing this?
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#137This 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 ident…
I was under the impression that the NSA already was tracking most people anyway?
GPS / phone network tracking probably has lower precision than short-range bluetooth. Bluetooth receivers can be present even in places without network reception or GPS, and receive signal passively and without a trace.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a security expert. However, this part looks worrying: > alice can also hide messages from times she wants to keep private If there's a need for this, doesn't that imply that the scheme does not actually keep Alice's privacy in all situations? Furthermore: > the random messages give the hospital NO INFO on where Alice was This seems to assume that the hospital (or anyone with access to the data, such as govern…
This definitely isn't "private". It's just obfuscated.
Agreed, whenever you divulge any info, you're always losing bits of randomness (obviously, more or less depending on how good the protocol is!).
In particular, given an adversary who has several points (receiving these codes) and knows the receiving location of each of these points can de-anonymize a person "A" who is COVID positive if they know, e.g., a minimal amount of A's usual daily movements (from cellphone tower location, for example).
That being said, the government probably has better ways of knowing who has COVID-19 and other infectious diseases :)
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#139Two major OS platforms covering majority of the population working together in an attempt to better track current populations at behest of the government. How could anyone even begin to feel a wee bit cynical? To question this effort it worse than wanting PATRIOT ACT to expire. It is downright unamerican.
I hate the fact that I definitely see a good reason for it and the goverment is more than happy to accommodate this power grab.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#140Thinking big, if this works against covid: could it later be used to severely limit or eliminate diseases such as the common cold and the flu? That would be an incredible win for humanity.
Nobody does contact tracing for flu, let alone common cold (which is caused by a bunch of different viruses)
Also, common cold mortality is extremely low.