Just pay each person a $100 if they download the app, or whatever. People react to incentives, and downloading the app brings no personal benefit. Change that.
Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
151–160 of 204 posts
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#152Contact tracing apps were NEVER going to work. There are numerous fundamental technical problems but those aren’t even worth getting into, because people won’t use this shit.
Smartphone contact tracing is an absurd silver bullet pipe dream from a bunch of hammers who see the world as full of nails. It won’t work, can’t work, and will not ever work.
How much more effort are people going to waste on this?? Every time this comes up on HN the horde mass downvotes anyone who dares to dissent. It’s been almost five months now.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#153If you have google maps installed on your phone and location turned on, every time you visit a restaurant you already get the message of "how did you like xyz, please rate and help other visitors" You are already living in a surveillance state. The difference is unlike in other places in the world you can complain and shout about it.
Reason 5,431 why I carry a 3g flip phone (with the battery often removed).
You should start looking into LTE flip phones. There aren't many (the Alcatel Go Flip comes to mind), but carriers are starting to phase out 3g. E.g. AT&T is killing 3g in 2022.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specifically, it seems that adoption rates are so low as to render the application nearly useless.
It's just like mask usage -- nearly useless unless a critical number of people are wearing them.
Seeing that even the Bay Area, where you'd expect people to be relatively compliant with masks, not attending gatherings, and social distancing, is seeing a case surge, I'm not convinced than anything non-essential indoors will reopen, and masks aren't making a big enough difference to change that.
That said, I've seen very little data about where people are getting it (outside of medical settings, meat processors, and prisons), and you'd think this would be pretty important to managing the spread.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#155Not possible until UWB is ubiquitous.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even assuming for a second that Google stores the location of every user (they didn’t store mine), how would they do contact tracing when they don’t have access to data on iOS devices? Even assuming they did, what key would they join on? But no, a confident blanket assertion is made without providing any evidence.
They definitely store location for the majority of users who use Google Maps, their location history is both very accurate and opt-out buried in settings menus. I don’t have numbers on percentages given that Google likely doesn’t share this data, but I feel safe in assuming that less than 5% of Google Maps users have turned off the location history feature.
Many potentially dangereous contacts happen inside where positioning doesn't work. Maybe in a restaurant the location could be inferred because you enter and leave through the same door. But in the subway/metro/underground? Also every high-raise building would create lots of false possitives by people that did not get close.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#157Just pay each person a $100 if they download the app, or whatever. People react to incentives, and downloading the app brings no personal benefit. Change that.
Really, I bet $10 would be enough to get a high adoption rate.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany adopted the Apple/Google framework, which is exactly what an Apple/Google app would use. The whole point of the design is that it’s decentralized and you wouldn’t be giving Apple/Google more information.
True. Except that the German app turns on EVERYTHING - LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS. And the carrier gets it all. I had the app installed for all of maybe 2 minutes because it did exactly what it claimed to do, but I'm not giving the carrier even more granular location info. The only thing I leave on when I leave the house is mobile data.
I'm not in Germany and I don't have compatible phone. But from all I have read the claim about turning on GPS is plain wrong.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#159There's no mention of China in this article. China had a pretty large-scale tracing system using smartphones. Has that also failed?
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
From personal experience in this industry, the issues are mostly pragmatic, i.e. legal, and then about authoritarian regimes. There are some ideological issues concerning 'personal information' that varies from company to company and we linger a lot about that in the Western press and on HN, but that's really not it. It's very simple: if your ABC company has the ability to 'trace' people, and you allow 'friendly coun…
Yes, this is likely the hard problem here. If one were to be cynical, one would say that it is also the strategy that makes the most economical sense for everyone. It's just a bit comical from a certain viewpoint. And to be clear, this is not just a problem of the Apples and Googles of the world. Many more face similar issues, starting with the telcos themselves. The point is that location tracing is something that i…
A better term than 'economics' is just power, where money is one factor.
Putin wants more power vis-a-vis his proles and if he can strong-arm a company into doing something, he will.
Apple and Google have a certain kind of power, governments do, but most companies have very little flex.
Specifically 'up and comers' i.e. startups must have to face some weird challenges there, certainly in the area of 'content filtering' and government access we are only scratching the surface.
I can only imagine what kind of deals FB has made with various regimes, and he lengths they will have done through to obfuscate it.