U.S. govt, tech industry discuss using location data to combat coronavirus

Before the Federal government gets location data, they're going to have to test to find out who has it.

> I'm curious, if I have no internet access and gps turned off on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S7) is there still hidden shit which is tracking my location? .. Like, is GPS not really turned off for example?

Your location can still be determined by at least your service provider based on the strength of the signal it emits as received from the (presumably various) antenna sites in the area.

The government tracking everyone's location all the time would be/is a gross infringement on privacy. The government tracking everyone's location for a limited time period in order to curb a deadly epidemic seems much more reasonable. The difficulty is trusting them to give back that power when the crisis is over. If not for the experience of the Patriot Act, I'd be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt there.

Still, if this were done in a truly open way, and the criteria for ending the program were clearly specified at its outset, it's something I could support. Looking at the Chinese response, advanced and extensive contact tracing has allowed them to restart significant commerce in areas where initial outbreaks have been controlled through social distancing. Doing the same here might not only save lives, but also livelihoods.

Of course I would be nervous about the potential for overreach, misuse, and acclimatization. But if the allowable uses and time-frame were set into law, perhaps those concerns would be outweighed by the potential benefits.

The interesting thing about ideas like this is that they reveal how authoritarianism during times of stability does a terrible amount of damage during times of crisis.

This is the sort of problem that could be solved in a better world; collecting location data to find interactions between people would allow you to get them tested faster and prevent a disease from spreading. But it simply can't be done in this country primarily because everyone has the entirely reasonable fear that the feds want this power for nefarious reasons and will never give it up - and they're probably right.

If we had a society where privacy was an absolute right, and civic trust in our community organizations and institutions was built up over time, during a crisis like this one we could come together and find agreement on a way of providing this data to a responsible institution that would use it only for the purpose of saving lives and then delete it when the crisis was over. And they'd lose access to future data at that point too. Anyone who still didn't trust the communal institutions could opt out, but the point of building up this trust is that it makes people want to work together and feel safe doing so.

We're so far from that in this country that we're not only paranoid about privacy issues, it seems altogether most likely that our secret agencies are actively planning to exploit this crisis to be able to spy on us in the future.

I have been somewhat conflicted/despairing about Taiwan’s response (only 77 cases and 1 death as of right now, 2020-Mar-17, despite reslly cloze ties with China and an almost equally early onset) since I read this: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689 a couple of weeks ago. Paragraph 2 is especially instructive. I have historically been dead against the type of cross referencing and identification this article discusses, but their capability for pulling multiple disparate sources together to allow tracing, categorization and enforced tracking of all individuals is massively impressive. We really need to either figure out a way to execute on these capabilities without revoking privacy, or else accept that some granting of privacy (whether to Google or another entity) will be inevitable.