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Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

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Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because Thiel has referenced this speaker before doesn’t mean he agrees with everything he says. It’s a bit suspicious Thiel would agree that talk of “promoting“ homosexuality should get someone expelled from society. Do you have any references showing Thiel believes these words you quoted?

Thiel didn't just reference Hoppe - he praised him and spoke at his conferences. In general, Thiel's political opinions are hardly a secret; you can read his own words at https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... : "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" This is literally the primary thesis of Hoppe's book. And note that Hoppe's isn't saying that promoting homosexuality s…

Thanks, I will take a look.

That explanation is much more reasonable. If people can choose which covenant to belong to, that's better then some larger collective (like a federal government) imposing it's morals on smaller groups.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#552

even without location tracking it’s creepy. what happens when the govt contact traces a man with his mistress and then blackmails him?

I laugh at conspiracy theories which revolve around the Government paying special attention to normal individuals. Dude, Governments have the power to tax millions of people. They don’t need your piddling bribery money. It’s too much work for too little reward.

i’m talking about what they did to mlk jr. even if it doesn’t affect me it still matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#553
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both movements disregard evidence and reality to fit their feelings.

Please show the scientific consensus that corporations are good, have almost no side effects and we should trust them.

Please show me where I made such a blanket, absolute statement.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you carry such a phone you already trust them. I don't. But not because I think my dumbphone isn't also basically a mic I carry around, but because mobile devices are a joke, one and all. It's like moving back to communicating with infant sounds after I learned how to walk, form sentences and use tools -- why would I? Because so many people do, that they already assume everybody does? I don't need e.g. Whatsapp…

if I was only reachable by mail they'd send me letters. Based on your comments above, I'd bet a lot of money that they wouldn't...

Because something you can't even specify rubbed you the wrong way, no person in the world loves me? That's just wishful thinking on your part.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t put Apple and Google in the same bucket when it comes to privacy. Sure, neither is probably perfect, but only one of them is an egregious violator whose business model depends on surveillance capitalism

apple is closed source and extremely secretive so i will keep putting them in the same bucket thanks

That seems like a different topic than privacy’s relationship to their business model...

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#556
post #436
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What??? I cannot make any sense out of your comment. No disrespect, but you're jumping around a lot and I do not follow. ETA: Allow me to explain for the downvoters: The size of the company is irrelevant. There are plenty of large companies that have honest leadership. I can trust a fraction of the size of the company, because I trust those people to not work for horrible companies. Trusting a human being and trustin…

There's a world of difference between projecting onto a non-living entity the properties of an animal, or those of a human - so I don't understand why you think what I did was an anthropomorphism. And I find the analogy to animals quite apt to be honest: Humans can have all sorts of motivations, including morality, and if you know that about a person, you can trust them. By comparison, wild animals (at least excludin…

I totally missed your point in the original post. Apologies for that! It seems others didn't. I agree with you.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#557
post #371

I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. I can understand why the public is skeptical, but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a…

I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy - I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. Basically, I can trust specific people if I feel that I know their character, and by proxy I might trust a company that these people have significant control over. Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic…

> I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy

I'd go the reverse. The bigger they are, the more I trust them.

> I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way.

But anybody who trusts them for that reason is indeed crazy.

Maybe out definition of trust is different. For me trust means predictability. Do I trust the sun will rise in the east or a stone will roll down the hill? Do I trust my mother will tell me off if I growl at my sister? Do I trust my father will ask me how the finances are going? These things are all predictable - so I trust them. To a lesser extent do I trust these people to keep their word? The answer is sometimes - if my mother promises to look after the kids then definitely, but if she promises not to buy them presents then I'll trust her a little less.

Companies are also predictable in some ways. Bigger companies more so than smaller ones, simply because it takes a lot longer to change the direction of a bigger ship. In my book predictable means trustworthy.

One of the things you can absolutely have faith in is a bigger company is driven by money. (A small company is more likely to be driven by idealism of its owners.) Money means users, so if a good record on privacy attracts users you can be pretty sure they will do their best to have a good record. Not surprisingly Apple and Google do have an extraordinarily good record on keeping data they store secure - far better than most governments for example.

It does not surprise me at all both companies are making a song and dance about how they are safeguarding your location data, and I trust them to do everything within their power to make good on that promise. Unfortunately they aren't gods - if they receive a court order to cough it up, they will. So trust has limits.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#558
post #251

I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. I can understand why the public is skeptical, but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a…

As an Australian who has privacy concerns their government's COVIDSafe app (see https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing ), and hence not installing it, I'm really thankful that Apple and Google are pushing this model of contact tracing. We still don't know if digital contact tracing is effective in practice, but it's still important to try, but we can do this in a way that avoids giving governments with worrying au…

There are two sides to trusting the covid-19 app. One is the technical side those people are commenting on. Technical deficiencies can be fixed, and more to the point will be fixed if you just keep shining some light on them as they are doing.

The other side is trusting the government to keep it's promises. During this covid-19 crisis I do trust them, but in the longer term their record of keeping promises has been less than stellar. Frankly, keeping this app or any app of theirs installed over a few years on the basis them promising not to missuse the data is downright foolish given their past history. Such promises tend to become null and void at the next election.

But right now we have no choice - it's either take them at their word, or don't install the app. Yes, we can do what the gang of four above have done and de-compile it, but that takes a huge amount of effort that has to be repeated every new release. That effort isn't going to continue. If it doesn't continue the light doesn't continue to shine on it's technical deficiencies, and so they won't be fixed.

But - that can change with a few simple and cheap changes to the way the government does things. All they have to do is release the source to a public repository before they release the binary and have a reproducible build. Do that lots of things become much easier. Checking what the commented source does as opposed decompiled output is much easier, checking just the differences in source between one version and the next is much, much easier than checking the entire thing, using reproducible build to allow you to check the source rather than decompiled output is very much easier. Do that, and the light on the technical deficiencies will stay on forever.

Implementing those inexpensive and straightforward things has anther wonderful emergent properties aside from the technical deficiencies being fixed: you suddenly don't have to trust the government, you can trust the code instead.

But no one seems to focus on changes to the overall process. Instead it's essentially nit picking on how the app does things today. It's an unfortunate focus.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's arguably a lot more evidence against Google than Apple here. But Apple did lie about their involvement, or even knowledge of, the PRISM program. Snowden leaks. I highly recommend Glenn Grennwald's book No Place to Hide if you're not interested in digging though sources yourself. Even against their will, companies with capabilities can and have been compelled by government agencies to go against their promises…

I've read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. It doesn't get more detailed than that. There is nothing in the book that indicates that Google's implementation of the contact tracing spec would deviate from the spec either through incompetence or malice. You're making vague, unsubstantiated claims about how this could be compromised. Even if there is a bug that allows such apps to collect location info, that has nothi…

> There is nothing in the book that indicates that Google's implementation of the contact tracing spec would deviate from the spec either through incompetence or malice.

I agree I'd trust Google over the government and many others. But the OP you are replying to called for releasing the source code, and reproducible builds. If you do that, you don't have to trust somebodies word or the laws of the land, you have the laws of mathematics in your court.

Surely you are not saying what is a clearly inferior solution is one we should be using.

Re: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

#560
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy - I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. Basically, I can trust specific people if I feel that I know their character, and by proxy I might trust a company that these people have significant control over. Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic…

> I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy I'd go the reverse. The bigger they are, the more I trust them. > I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. But anybody who trusts them for that reason is indeed crazy. Maybe out definition of trust is different. For me trust means predictability. Do I trust the sun will rise in the east or a stone will roll down the hill?…

> I'd go the reverse. The bigger they are, the more I trust them.

that is just silly.

> bigger company is driven by money

Follow that money. Figure out who pays. Are you the customer?

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