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Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

bluetrace.io

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Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#51

Post by Proziam »

throwanem wrote: post #47
Proziam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that people don't lose sight of the long term in spite of the short term suffering we may experience. You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever. How many movements would have been impossible if a local government could spy on everyone to break it up before it even begins? I'm thankful we didn't have the same technology we have now during the civil rights…

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You can only get sick and die once, but that lasts forever too.

Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when their time comes.

Of course, 'you can only surrender your rights once' and 'you can only die once' aren't equivalent either. Once a nation of people surrenders their rights, nobody ever has those rights again (even if the loss of those rights costs lives). A person, or a group of people, becoming ill or passing away doesn't take away the lives of the next generation.

If you think back on the experiences of the last century, how much harm would be done if we couldn't freely assemble because a government decided to intervene? We'd have stayed in Vietnam longer, black folks may not have ever won their civil rights, and its possible women would be unable to vote.

For the record, I don't downplay the suffering of illness. I've lost a parent to cancer, as well as many other family members. Everyone else alive is in the same boat. We're all mortal.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#52

Post by throwanem »

Proziam wrote: post #51
throwanem wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You can only get sick and die once, but that lasts forever too.

Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when t…

It's not really about what I want or don't want; for one thing, I don't have children and never will.

If I did, though, I suspect I would want them to live.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#53

Post by baybal2 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #50
mellow2020 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of contact tracing is to find out who to quarantine, so you don’t have to lock down the entire population. But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected. > It’s why most of them don’t get to this point. But we are at this point already.

>But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.[..] But we are at this point already. Singapore isn't. (the government that is building this app). Neither is Taiwan. Through a combination of contact tracing, surveillance, national health databases and enforcing compliance of quarantined individuals by for example regularly checking in on them the…

Even without that, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all have a no joke civil service. Them being able to come up with something in the time of crisis fast is a consequence of that, not the other way around.

Even if one or two piecemeal measures like that were to be implemented, it will not change the fact of terrific ineptitude of current, and few previous office holders.

Without fixing that first, you will never get to the level of trust needed for the society to function, and not to fall apart upon first serious crisis.

In comparison to East Asia, North America is a very uneventful place, where the apparatus of state has not been truly stress tested in decades. For every Katrina USA had, countries in Asia have like 20, and having non-idiots in the office is much more of an existential need.

Even in a patently broken country like PRC, it's the response to natural disasters which is the only thing that really tickles the CPC when it comes to public anger.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#54

Post by Dystopian »

I feel like this would be a lot easier and have a higher rate of usage/compliance if our tech companies actually worked with people to release or opt-into sharing this information for when it's necessary (information which is already secretly shared with governments for security).

For the majority of people if they go to https://www.google.com/maps/timeline they'll have a tracker of everywhere they've visited and the time they were in each location.

If you could take people's accounts who've been infected and give them the ability to opt-into sharing this information you could have a pretty good source of information about the locations where they dwelled for long periods of time and who should go into self-isolation.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#55

Post by Proziam »

throwanem wrote: post #52
Proziam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when t…

It's not really about what I want or don't want; for one thing, I don't have children and never will. If I did, though, I suspect I would want them to live .

I honestly wonder if more people have been killed by dictators and authoritarian regimes or the black plague. I suspect it's relatively comparable. As technology has progressed, I believe it's become more reasonable to fear man more than nature.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#56

Post by hrasyid »

Proziam wrote: post #42
throwanem wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying. I regret that - assuming my own ongoing case of COVID-19 resolves without fatal complication - I'm quite likely, I think, to have that curiosity satisfied. I regret it because this isn't a cause for change of perspec…

My hope is that people don't lose sight of the long term in spite of the short term suffering we may experience. You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever. How many movements would have been impossible if a local government could spy on everyone to break it up before it even begins? I'm thankful we didn't have the same technology we have now during the civil rights…

> You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever

With an app like tracetogether, you can just uninstall it after the pandemic, right? No need to surrender your rights forever.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#57

Post by GordonS »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #37
tomcooks wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical for sure, don't know about that "needlessly" given it's an endless fight where everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever. This time they give you the opensource bit, next time it's "a matter of emergency", then they stop asking and just punish you if you don't comply. >Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm n…

> everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever. This is tin foil hat nonsense. The US has implemented martial law before. Those rights weren't taken away forever.

Sorry, but we are long past the point of calling out privacy advocates as "tinfoil hat wearers" - just look at everything that came out after Snowden. Beforehand, most people would have derided others for mentioning "such conspiracy nonsense" (I likely would have myself), and yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core, paranoid conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.

Since 9/11 in particular, the Western world has seen constant attempts to increase mass surveillance, lower the burden of proof, and dampen human rights, always in the name of whatever they have the public most fearful of at the time - drugs, terrorists, paedos, criminals, the Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, communists, Islam, foreigners taking our jobs, the boogey man de jour.

I'm absolutely certain that we'll see politicians try to use coronavirus as an excuse for their Orwellian schemes.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#59

Post by GordonS »

dheera wrote: post #28
WaylonKenning wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all carry around a radio that broadcasts our location. I guess we'll end up switching off Bluetooth except to known good devices, or when we intentionally want to discover what's around us.

I don't know, I'd probably turn mine on just so that I can get notified if I am within proximity of a high infection risk stranger. I would love to have that kind of notification. Just for now. Uninstall when the pandemic clears.

I can imagine something like that could lead to people abusing, beating up or killing the infected. It might sound far-fetched, but this was happening in Kenya quite recently.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#60

Post by [deleted] »

sly010 wrote: post #11

Sadly this won't happen in the US. Even if it's really private, people won't install it unless it's pushed down to them as an update from above, and no company will want to be the first to push it. I suspect the bigger issue is people don't want to be told by an app that they need to go get tested. Come to think of it, cities like New York could push it as part of a bigger, more comprehensive covid app...

[deleted]
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