Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
1–10 of 484 posts
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#2> We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.
Great!
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#3Google announcement: https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/...
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#4Pretty good illustration of how private and secure contact tracing can work here: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/
Not sure whether that's what this implementation would look like.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#5it is just shockingly important that we come out of this _without_ a dystopian nightmare of a surveillance state.
That apple's involved in this is hopeful -- their earlier work on anonymizing Maps.app directions is well worth thinking about here. tl;dr your route is broken up into n chunks, each chunk gets a uuid that isn't tied to your handset, and so serverside nobody knows where Bob's Iphone just asked to go. [0]
Doing this kind of "differential privacy" or whatever we want to call it today properly is very hard, but it is also very, very important to get right.
[0] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/03/13/apple-maps-navigati...
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#6Google announcement: https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/...
Further deep links to the technical side:
https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu... Cryptographic Specification
https://www.blog.google/documents/55/Android_Contact_Tracing... Android API
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#7it is just shockingly important that we come out of this _without_ a dystopian nightmare of a surveillance state. That apple's involved in this is hopeful -- their earlier work on anonymizing Maps.app directions is well worth thinking about here. tl;dr your route is broken up into n chunks, each chunk gets a uuid that isn't tied to your handset, and so serverside nobody knows where Bob's Iphone just asked to go. [0]…
I am hoping that Apple being involved will keep this as privacy respecting as it reasonably can be given what it is doing.
I am generally someone that takes privacy very seriously, I mostly avoid Google products and others for this reason.
But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all done, and preferably the code removed completely. I trust Apple to do this, not sure if I would trust google too.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#8It just takes one erroneous logging call in the wrong place and all this niceness goes away. Hopefully we don't get a headline in the future of "Bug found with contact tracing app, we actually had access to everything but we're sorry and we'll fix it". Not entirely against this work, it will provide benefit but let's hope for the best.
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#9Looks like it was inspired by the TraceTogether app built by the Singapore Government and recently Opensourced.
https://www.gov.sg/article/help-speed-up-contact-tracing-wit...
Re: Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology
#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?