It's because the privacy-at-any-cost camp, like the EFF, raised hell and prevented Apple from making an app themselves. So only cash-starved state governments can make apps, which is unlikely to happen.
They have blood on their hands.
Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
161–170 of 204 posts
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#162"Contact tracing" was the new "blockchain" for a while. It is a technology with great potential, but I don't expect a truely effective, well-designed solution to be deployed at a large enough scale to be useful for years to come. I think it will eventually mature enough to be useful for future outbreaks - even for more benign disease. For now, though, I want to see the technology spend a little more time in the oven.
Do you actually have specific criticisms or is this just a vague feeling? To say it’s not well thought out is a baseless accusation.
I don't think it's poorly thought out. I just think the tech is immature and the current incarnations will have to quickly improve or be superceded by something significantly better in the next few years.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#163I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building an…
Idk, maybe Google and Apple could do more, but I thought it was almost a wonder how fast Google and Apple came up with a workable framework.
Because it is not location tracking. It is simpler. It just records nearby pings of other phones.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#164Korea did this successfully but you have to give up a lot more privacy. This protect my privacy, and expecting it to work great is some fallacy.
That’s why the Apple/Google process was setup to not track your location.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a false choice. But even if it were true, yes, over lives. People already died fighting for my liberal rights, I'm not willing to trade any of that for some temporary safety. I'm from a Warsaw pact country. Seeing westerners so willing to give up their rights these days is so deeply disappointing.
The false choice here is actually that you can sacrifice lives and still expect to have freedom. The alternative to not giving up privacy for contact tracing or similar measures is to be locked into your home medieval style while the plague runs wild in the streets, which is a significantly stronger limitation of freedoms. The choice isn't between liberty or safety, just as it isn't between economic health and lockdo…
> The false choice here is actually that you can sacrifice lives and still expect to have freedom.
To the contrary, lives sacrificed is necessary for liberty.
Personally, I would rather die of covid (or terrorists) than be locked in my house (or have my movements surveilled) by a government that fetishizes safety above all else. To hell with safety.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact tr…
I believe this isn't correct. Contact tracing can't work using location data, because it's far too coarse and unreliable to be useful. Too many false positives. The point isn't to figure out where the contacts were. It's to figure out who they were.
This has privacy implications and is ripe for abuse. What then? The gov't forcibly quarantines those people? Displays the info on a public web page so neighbours can bolt their doors shut like it happened in Wuhan? Maybe it's just me but I can already think of a Minority Report kind of scenario.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I understood lockdown measures, know that this is your privilege talking. You can stay in lockdown because you're middle class living in a wealthy country. In countries like India lockdown can cost far more than what Covid-19 can do. I'm not arguing against public health measures, when the cost to me is low or when accompanied by evidence. So where's the evidence that tracing apps work? That South Korea does it…
> 'm not arguing against public health measures, when the cost to me is low or when accompanied by evidence. Sometime there are no clear evidences, just suppositions - or the individual cost is not insignificant. In that case you should not be surprised to be forced to stay at home, similarly to not being allowed in a school when not vaccinated. You decide to pose a risk to society - you must face the consequences. M…
I'm sorry for your immuno-depressed wife. I also have family members over 60 that would be at higher risk if they contacted Covid-19. And I'm an asthmatic and asthmatics are at higher risk.
But that's still not a reason to have my privacy traded away.
And if you're going to treat me like the enemy, willing to trade my freedoms away, for your safety, then don't be surprised if I'm going to treat you like an enemy too.
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I'm totally fine with vaccination btw. That's a really poor analogy b/c vaccination is the best evidence-based strategy we have for fighting viruses and it's a one time cost to pay.
To be honest, even if contact tracing apps had evidence that they work somewhat, I'd still not trade my privacy away. I only pointed out the lack of evidence because it is absurd to give up your freedoms on something that may or may not work.
In any case, I'd rather catch the virus.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the same argument as justifying the NSA's mass surveillance with terrorism. Because lives are involved, it's propagated like a killer argument. Fact is, you don't know if even worse things aren't going to be enabled with this technology.
An important part of the NSA problem is that terrorist conspiracies are a largely imaginary boogeyman. The vast majority of its collection is unwarranted. But the pandemic is real, we know that the damage it does is directly related to the effectiveness of contact tracing, and we know that anyone having contacts outside the household is doing an unusual and extremely dangerous thing. This is more like tailing people…
The moment you start seeing regular people as terrorists, that's when you've lost the plot ;-)
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#169If 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.
Another difference is that you aren't using this data (which are collected anyway) to contain the epidemic. I can't figure out why.
They don't have the X is infected part and the data is also aggregated.
Re: Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 'm not arguing against public health measures, when the cost to me is low or when accompanied by evidence. Sometime there are no clear evidences, just suppositions - or the individual cost is not insignificant. In that case you should not be surprised to be forced to stay at home, similarly to not being allowed in a school when not vaccinated. You decide to pose a risk to society - you must face the consequences. M…
I'm sorry for your immuno-depressed wife. I also have family members over 60 that would be at higher risk if they contacted Covid-19. And I'm an asthmatic and asthmatics are at higher risk. But that's still not a reason to have my privacy traded away. And if you're going to treat me like the enemy, willing to trade my freedoms away, for your safety, then don't be surprised if I'm going to treat you like an enemy too.…
> And if you're going to treat me like the enemy, willing to trade my freedoms away, for your safety, then don't be surprised if I'm going to treat you like an enemy too.
Yes of course, this is normal. And that's why I am actively working for a legal framework to coerce people into staying at home in these cases. I highlight the word "legal" as otherwise it will be chaos.
> That's a really poor analogy b/c vaccination is the best evidence-based strategy we have for fighting viruses and it's a one time cost to pay.
In some cases we need to be proactive without string evidence. In the case of COVID-19 this is not a matter of being psychologically comfortable (as opposed to, say, religion where anything goes for me, at least until it does not directly hits others). It is a matter to use that until we have better solutions.
> In any case, I'd rather catch the virus.
This is your choice. Please just make sure to keep it to yourself and also to realize that you will be using a medical facility overloaded by people who not only caught it willingly, but also those ones who did not.
But no matter what I really do hope you will not catch it :)