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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

#64

Post by acqq »

kian wrote: post #49

It says this is opt-in - is this just the sending of covid information, or is it the entire contact-tracing key-exchange enterprise?

If I understand correctly, it's up to every infected person to manually click "upload" (edit: here was "who I was close to", but it's not correct, see note 1 here) once he gets diagnosed, i.e. completely voluntary.

That is so that once one is diagnosed others can check if they were close to that one (and when?). And even these lists aren't supposed to be any typical metadata but something that stays local and the third parties can't reconstruct.

The idea is, again if I understood, that those who remain negative never have to upload anything that gives any traceable information about them.

See my other post here with other relevant quotes from the specification.

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Edit:

1) Actually what is uploaded is: "the Daily Tracing Keys for days where the user could have been affected"

"Upon a positive test of a user for COVID-19, their Diagnosis Keys and associated DayNumbers are uploaded to the Diagnosis Server. A Diagnosis Server is a server that aggregates the Diagnosis Keys from the users who tested positive and distributes them to all the user clients who are using contact tracing."

The matching is done locally on every device:

"In order to identify any exposures, each client frequently fetches the list of Diagnosis Keys. Since Diagnosis Keys are sets of Daily Tracing Keys with their associated Day Numbers, each of the clients are able to re-derive the sequence of Rolling Proximity Identifiers that were advertised over Bluetooth from the users who tested positive. In order to do so, they use each of the Diagnosis Keys with the function defined to derive the Rolling Proximity Identifier. For each of the derived identifiers, they match it against the sequence they have found through Bluetooth scanning."

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

#66

Post by gruez »

CubsFan1060 wrote: post #22
jefftk wrote: post #10

> would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in I don't see how this can work unless it gets very high distribution. I wonder if local governments might do something where the shelter-in-place orders are lifted for some categories of people conditional on running the app?

Given the number of people wearing masks, I think this would have a decent opt-in rate. Especially since, for most people, this is much easier than wearing a mask.

How many of those people are wearing masks for selfish reasons , ie. they don't want to get infected themselves?

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

#68

Post by ceejayoz »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #43
ceejayoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this absolutist mindset. It doesn't have to work this way. We can have, say, the draft - an absolutely whopping restriction on civil liberties - during WWII but get rid of it when it's no longer needed.

We haven't gotten rid of it, it still exists. It just isn't being used right now. Getting rid of it would be to abolish it entirely, and instead require people to voluntarily consent in the future. (And if you can't get people to agree to it, perhaps that should tell you something.) "needed" isn't even a factor here. An involuntary mechanism for contact or location tracing that's accessible to governmental authoritie…

> It just isn't being used right now.

The American public exercised their power to elect politicians who'd end the draft as the Vietnam War got progressively more unpopular. It's well within our powers, if we care enough.

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