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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

#81

Post by monadic2 »

mshroyer wrote: post #22
tomcooks wrote: post #12

Can't wait to be tracked by tech developed by a governmental team in the name of safety. Opensource or not a leash is a leash.

This is needlessly cynical. TraceTogether uses client-side logging so as to leave data in the hands of the users up until it's actually needed for contact tracing. Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you. Otherwise, apps may go a long way to improve the speed and accuracy of contact tracing. Here in the…

> Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic?

Why does this imply such invasive measures?

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#82

Post by monadic2 »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #25
tomcooks wrote: post #12

Can't wait to be tracked by tech developed by a governmental team in the name of safety. Opensource or not a leash is a leash.

This is much better than tracking people via facial and video recognition captured with near-omnipresent camera feeds. This is tracking signals that an optional device optionally broadcasts (and has for years). You can easily avoid this tracking by not having your phone broadcast bluetooth or by not carrying a phone. Not to mention any number of actors could have already been tracking this signal for years . It's the…

> This is much better than tracking people via facial and video recognition captured with near-omnipresent camera feeds.

Yea, but it's much worse than non-shitty suggestions. Obviously if you pick the shittiest option anything will look good.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#83

Post by shadowgovt »

GordonS wrote: post #70
shadowgovt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business as usual has come after Snowden; that's the reason people who have a default-antagonistic reaction to any new technology that could be employed by a government for tracking get labeled "tinfoil-hat wearers." The future of society isn't no surveillance. That's not tractable. Genie's out of the bottle (as this release of a population tracking tool as open source demonstrates). The question isn't how to stop it…

> Business as usual has come after Snowden I can't disagree with that; honestly, it felt like the media and politicians conspired to bury it. Revelation after revelation was made after outlets like The Intercept went through the evidence, yet hardly anything made the mainstream news, and when it did, it was fleeting. The CIA destroyed evidence and lied to congress, but there was little impact. > The question isn't ho…

I don't think the issue went away because anyone conspired to bury it. I think the issue went away because, on average, Americans are comfortable with the arrangement that the intelligence agencies have broad power to dragnet data. They either don't get that these tools could be used against them by unethical government agents or they know that possibility exists but they trust the checks and balances against it and think the risk is outweighed by the benefit to law enforcement and the national intelligence community in managing the international threat of global terrorist activity (which, itself, leverages modern communications tools to communicate rapidly, move rapidlt, hide from law enforcement and military powers, etc.).

9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again, even 20 years later.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

bosie wrote: post #76
groby_b wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only method that works is quarantine" Literally nobody in the epi community believes that. Would you please state your credentials, or cite a credible source for that statement? (For the opposite, please do read takes from Trevor Bedford, Mark Lipsitch, Carl Bergstrom, Andy Slavitt or really pretty much anybody in the field) We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool. As SK ha…

> We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool How do you know that this is the current state? > As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment) "meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?

> How do you know that this is the current state?

Look at the number of cases and their regional distribution, realize that those are tested cases and thus, with a) asymptomatic carriers and b) really bad testing in the US, the number of active cases is at least 10x that. Then realize you're dealing with an exponential process. United States are thoroughly infected already.

> "meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?

Not now, but if and when the US implements proper suppression measures, and the number of cases goes down to manageable levels (while at the same time the supply chain of PPE catches up to demand), then the supply of equipment will be meaningful.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

mellow2020 wrote: post #48
closeparen wrote: post #31

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. It’s not a “copout,” it’s the bread and butter of epidemic mitigation. It’s why most of them don’t get to this point.

> 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.

That's because every single Western country has fucked up the handling of initial stages of the pandemic. Everyone has seen what's going on in China and then Italy, and we all ended up on the spectrum of doing too little, too late (US in particular is leading here).

"Stay at home", social distancing, closing up businesses - those are suppression strategies. They're meant to shut the virus spread down. But they don't have to last all the way until the vaccine - if the number of cases and infection rate go down enough, these measures can be lifted - and then contact tracing can be used to do local quarantines and shutdowns with surgical precision, ensuring most people can live their daily lives as if no pandemic was happening.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#86

Post by [deleted] »

mellow2020 wrote: post #48
closeparen wrote: post #31

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. It’s not a “copout,” it’s the bread and butter of epidemic mitigation. It’s why most of them don’t get to this point.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

alkonaut wrote: post #61
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…

> Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone. Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed? The way I see it is so long as there is a pandemic we have no freedom anyway. It might seem like tracking your citizens is infringing a freedom, but if the option is house arrest I don’t mind. Any government that wo…

> Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed?

There's a risk that once the capacity is tried and tested, governments and private companies alike will try to make it enticing and useful for different means. The role of privacy activists should be nipping all these follow-up ideas in the bud. Ensuring that emergency measures are used only during actual emergencies. But not fighting them in situations like this.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#88

Post by TeMPOraL »

GordonS wrote: post #70
shadowgovt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business as usual has come after Snowden; that's the reason people who have a default-antagonistic reaction to any new technology that could be employed by a government for tracking get labeled "tinfoil-hat wearers." The future of society isn't no surveillance. That's not tractable. Genie's out of the bottle (as this release of a population tracking tool as open source demonstrates). The question isn't how to stop it…

> Business as usual has come after Snowden I can't disagree with that; honestly, it felt like the media and politicians conspired to bury it. Revelation after revelation was made after outlets like The Intercept went through the evidence, yet hardly anything made the mainstream news, and when it did, it was fleeting. The CIA destroyed evidence and lied to congress, but there was little impact. > The question isn't ho…

How do you propose a XXI-century technologically advanced society can do to ensure its biosafety? The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful. Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to individuals and small groups. Society needs a defense to compensate. Biology is particularly nasty here, as it's self-replicating.

Quite honestly, I'm increasingly starting to believe that privacy has been on borrowed time ever since we discovered DNA. That doesn't mean all privacy is going to be gone; just that to survive, societies need to learn how to handle pandemics very swiftly, and that seems to require large-scale, real-time management.

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#89

Post by fierarul »

t0ughcritic wrote: post #15
snarf21 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in a new york minute. This is already built into iOS in their newer Find My Phone. The carriers also know who and where we are just need to add in covid testing data. The problem is that even if it is decentralized and OSS, then the average user can't/won't install it. If it is simple and easy (centralized), then it becomes a honey pot for the government.

Carriers know where we are, are you referring to triangulation?

Tower info plus other sources. A while back I couldn't stop my iPhone from connecting to the 'free' Orange WiFi at my mall.

Since signal is weak I enabled 'WiFi calling' which also shares location info with the carrier (so they know if you are roaming or not, presumably).

Re: Singapore to Open Source Bluetooth Contact Tracing

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

Cancer isn't like a pandemic. Cancer multiply within a body; pathogens multiply within societies.

I disagree with "you can only surrender your rights once"; unlike life, rights can be won back. There's plenty of places on the planet in which you couldn't freely speak or assemble just a couple decades ago, but now you can. Things aren't going monotonically from bad to worse (though I admit, there's a strong directional pressure here; maintaining rights feels like fighting entropy).

I am a parent, I want my child to live in a world where the government doesn't abuse and spy on them, but where that government is also capable of containing an infectious pathogen (whether natural or purpose-made) pretty much as soon as it registers. There is a practical balance to be found there.

(And if we're trading imaginary worlds: I want my child to live in a world where private entities don't spy on them and sell private information, a world where adtech doesn't exist.)

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