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There is no need to track everyone's location, even for a limited time. South Korea only tracks the locations of people who were confirmed to have been infecte

by kijin 7y ago

There is no need to track everyone's location, even for a limited time. South Korea only tracks the locations of people who were confirmed to have been infected, and cross-checks their location data with CCTV footage as well as credit card records. That's a lot of data, but only for certain people. For each case outside of the Daegu area, local governments are tasked with publishing a list of locations and timestamps -- easily visualized on a map -- to help others figure out if they were in the same place at the same time as an infected person. There is no need to track the other people, as they would show up at testing centers on their own. Also, the people in charge of doing all the tracking have no obvious ties to law enforcement. The government is not a monolithic institution; there are both legal and technical barriers to sharing data among the various agencies. The police in S.K. only gets involved when known-infected people refuse to cooperate, since it's a crime to interfere with an epidemiological investigation. I'm not sure who "the feds" referred to in the article are, but if they have any ties to law enforcement or are asking for data about an unnecessarily large number of people, beware!

tempestn 7y ago
Once you know someone was infected, you need to go back and see where they've been up to that point. That's only possible if you're tracking everyone. Of course you don't need to keep the tracking data on everyone for more than ~14 days. Yes, there are other ways to do this tracking and contact tracing, but they are much more labor-intensive and imperfect. Governments can and should still do this, but once a certain percentage of the population becomes infected, it's no longer feasible. Also the more contacts that are missed through these tracking measures, the more potential avenues for spread. Hence the attractiveness of a system that would both be more comprehensive and require much more manual work.

by kijin 7y ago

tempestn 7y ago

Once you know someone was infected, you need to go back and see where they've been up to that point. That's only possible if you're tracking everyone. Of course you don't need to keep the tracking data on everyone for more than ~14 days. Yes, there are other ways to do this tracking and contact tracing, but they are much more labor-intensive and imperfect. Governments can and should still do this, but once a certain percentage of the population becomes infected, it's no longer feasible. Also the more contacts that are missed through these tracking measures, the more potential avenues for spread. Hence the attractiveness of a system that would both be more comprehensive and require much more manual work.