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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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider, for example, that 1/3 of the country is on a rent strike right now Errr - no, no they aren’t. This month had approximately 12% more people miss their rent payment than last April. That’s high - and bad news for people like my retired aunt and uncle, or father in law, who rely on the income from their rental property - but it’s hardly a national rent strike.

Not sure if the 1/3 is correct or not but consider this- that's the rise for April. Even people who live paycheck to paycheck can often find a way to scrounge together that money if they just lost their job. I'd say reserve judgement until we see how many people pay their rent in May.

Not paying your rent because you can’t afford it != joining a rent strike.

The rent strike movement is a political one, and has little to do with wether or not one can afford rent.

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone smarter than me ELI5 how devices are able to "re-derive the sequence of Rolling Proximity Identifiers" of the infected? I know that the RPI is derived from the daily key + TimeIntervalNumber. But these devices should only be receiving the daily keys + the current day. Everything else about the spec is pretty easy to follow and gets my a-okay.

Think of the daily key as the seed to a random number generator. If two people pass the same seed into the same random number generator, they can generate the same list of 500 random numbers. This provides a compact way for someone to say: "I just learned that I was infected. These are the 500 identifiers I broadcast on that day. If you recognize one of them, then you might also be infected." https://tcn-coalition.or…

I understand that aspect of it; I'm just confused as to how only having the daily key is enough to generate the identifiers. Wouldn't they also need the TimeIntervalNumber, according to the function?

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

#473
post #453
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public safety is not a human right, while privacy is. If we abandon our commitments to human rights in times of crisis, how important are they to us, really?

> Public safety is not a human right, while privacy is. Seriously? “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” is literally Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and 1&2 are “this applies to everyone; yes, we mean it”. Privacy is all the way down in Article 12. I’ll take my life, health and freedom, for which targeted suppression of this disease is essential, over my privacy an…

You can't really have no privacy and freedom. Isn't that obvious?

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

#474
post #97

The spec pdf looks a lot like the DP-3T protocol. The DP-3T docs have more explanation and a good discussion of privacy aspects. https://github.com/DP-3T/documents paper: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%... data protection aspects: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20-%20Da... Here's an overview comparing that approach to some others (such as Singapore's tracetogether): h…

They're not the same and I think Google/Apple's is a bit better. In DP3T the infected person shares a single daily key from which all future daily keys can be derived. In Google/Apple's each daily key is HKDF derived from a master key and they are not linkable. Infected people share the relevant daily keys from their infection period. THat's more data to push around, but it is better for privacy. It means that contac…

Check the second half of the DP3T white paper - the 'high cost' version does not do that, and unlike the Apple/Google version, allows you to redact more specific times of day you do not want to upload, for whatever reason. It is important to also weigh up these issues against daily bandwidth concerns for usability.

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

#475
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This contact tracing has nothing to do with “sharing files”.

Please refer to the BlueTrace and iOS bluetooth issues, now Apple is willing to open up .. https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/04/10/leaky.html

Again... you seem to be confusing BLE and beacons (non-connectable advertising packets) with “file transfer”.

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

#476

Contact tracing has a time and place, and it's early in isolated outbreaks. The cat is out of the bag at this point and thinking we're going to contact trace our way to safety is a false promise. You'd have to be naive and short-sighted to accept their pinky-promise of privacy-first in this context.

exactly. do we have data about whether contact tracing of this kind ever worked? S.Korea started testing+tracing somewhere midway in their epidemic, far earlier than where the epidemic is now in france, uk and USA. maybe other countries can benefit from this tracing, but it remains to be proved. In Singapore, which does well, apparently only 6% of ppl installed the contact tracing app. Israel seems to be using carrie…

if this rolled out, just the knowledge of its existence would probably put some fear in people to comply with whatever the government was asking people to do. it's a case being made for total surveillance.

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

#477
post #223

An interesting Twitter thread on why the stand-alone contact tracing apps that many others are building won't work, and why integrated platform solutions like this are necessary: https://twitter.com/zainy/status/1248482486524379137 (but of course, necessary does not mean sufficient)

Also, efficiency depends on how many persons can be tested. If it's 10000 a day, in my country, it's about 1/500 th of the population a day... If it's enough to test say 1/10 of the population to have some results, this will take 1-2 months... I have the impression that all of this is forced upon us as to make us believe that it is safe to get back to work ASAP. Wouldn't it be better to just wait ? (I'm not intereste…

FWIW, I’ll “tell it that way”. I think it’s a interesting topic. And a real one manifest in our actions all the time. There is a real cost to life and trade offs.

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

#478
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, efficiency depends on how many persons can be tested. If it's 10000 a day, in my country, it's about 1/500 th of the population a day... If it's enough to test say 1/10 of the population to have some results, this will take 1-2 months... I have the impression that all of this is forced upon us as to make us believe that it is safe to get back to work ASAP. Wouldn't it be better to just wait ? (I'm not intereste…

FWIW, I’ll “tell it that way”. I think it’s a interesting topic. And a real one manifest in our actions all the time. There is a real cost to life and trade offs.

I'd say that's the pragmatist versus idealist debate. I'm on the latter side :-)

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

#479
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I’ll “tell it that way”. I think it’s a interesting topic. And a real one manifest in our actions all the time. There is a real cost to life and trade offs.

I'd say that's the pragmatist versus idealist debate. I'm on the latter side :-)

Well if we were hanging out in person it’d be fun to hash this out :)
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