11 ms·
Private Kit: Can we slow the spread without giving up individual privacy?
- jameslevy 7y agoAre tools such as homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, etc. applicable here? There should be a way for users to control their location data, and opt-in to sharing it at times like this, and then opt-out later.
- shuckles 7y agoHomomorphic encryption is not computationally practical and differential privacy relies on noise which is not ideal when (i) errors compound as is the case of contact tracing where each new node introduces many candidates for exposure and (ii) there is a high cost of false positives or negatives.
- jameslevy 7y agoPerhaps this is a use case for a secure enclave, where location data is stored, a biometric authenticated authorization can be used for releasing it, and there is provably no backdoor for this feature to be used without the user's approval. I hope to see companies like AAPL address this in a way that solves for these types of situations without introducing draconian oversight capabilities.
- prophesi 7y agoFor those curious by the claim that homomorphic encryption is not computationally practical, Bruce Shneier has a great article on it https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/homomorphic_enc.html?nc=11 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/homomorphic_e...
- riedel 7y agoBecause my guess is that location will give you too may false positives if ppl realy use that system. I wonder if it would not be better to do sth like emitting colocation ble beacons with totp sequence and a random secret. If some is tested positive you release the secret or a even only a list of the emitted beacons in the relevant timeframe. Everyone can then check against the list they recorded. Does that make sense?
- awinter-py 7y agoif this is just logging location, how does it do contact tracing? don't you need everyone's location, or the 'nearby' data like gov.sg's 'trace together'?
- 1996 7y agoIndividual privacy is where I draw a line in the sand. I'm ready to do many things, but that does not include allowing geotracking, geofencing or any other restriction on the freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. The government can shut businesses, shut public parks and beaches, but what we do in our homes, clubs and other private properties is off limits.
- isoprophlex 7y agoI agree completely. I found this FT article by Harari a very lucid and accessible essay on how we should handle the crisis. https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75 https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc... How we decide to strike a balance between privacy and safety today will determine the shape of our world in the coming decades.
- aplummer 7y ago> any other restriction on the freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. > clubs and other private properties is off limits. To give you the benefit of the doubt, you don’t mean that you refuse to have temporarily restricted movement during a pandemic?
- ndiscussion 7y agoI believe that is what they refuse. I refuse it.
- aplummer 7y agoWow. It’s so selfish to sacrifice other people’s lives for your own delusional paranoia.
- jlokier 7y agoIt's worse than delusional paranoia. Because it's not necessarily delusional, or paranoid. Give them the benefit of the doubt: Assume they are competent, healthy adults, who really believe in what they say. With that assumed, it's someone choosing to sacrifice other people's lives for their political values. Personally I think that situation crosses the "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" line. We should certainly build systems that protect privacy if we can, to the extent we can. I'm very pro privacy, not against privacy at all. But to the extent values conflict in a material situation, such as privacy versus not harming other people in a deadly way as the current crisis, we have to choose priorities, and then be smart and subtle about retaining as much of our overall values as we still can given the priorities.
- saagarjha 7y agoSummary: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UGY07m8GNrUaj9bGRx07vDMccxTcGRQS/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UGY07m8GNrUaj9bGRx07vDMccxT... Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08567.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08567.pdf It seems like the way this preserves privacy is that you only upload your location information once you're tested positive, where it is "redacted" (I have very little faith in this) and then sent to everyone else so they can check to see if they were in contact with you. It's better than mass surveillance, sure, but I'm not sure if you can claim that this doesn't give up individual privacy.
- RegnisGnaw 7y agoMandatory or optional? Will the government force me to upload if I am positive? Or can I choose not to?
- saagarjha 7y agoOptional, presumably. Nobody is forcing you to install the app if it was mandatory anyways (and how would the app know you were positive?), so it makes little difference.
- plafl 7y agoWhat do you think is the ethical option? If you are positive shouldn't the people in contact with you know it? I'm genuinely asking, it's not a rethorical question. I think they should know they have been exposed to the virus at least, not necessarily knowing it was you. You already have lost some rights of movement and assembly. Losing some privacy may help you regain them sooner.
- cat199 7y ago> You already have lost some rights not sure which side of the fence I actually stand here, but this would add at least 4th/5th amendment in US context to the list
- dillondoyle 7y agoPrecedent for making it mandatory - state by state with varying degrees of confidentiality : https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/hiv-and-health-law-striking-balance-between-legal-mandates-and-medical-ethics/2005-10 https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/hiv-and-health-...
- RegnisGnaw 7y agoIf sharing your location is optional, then there will be people who opt out. Depending on how many people opt out, the data may be useless.
- awinter-py 7y agoI'm not an epidemiologist, but partial contact tracing is probably better than none especially if the goal is to slow not stop
- hutzlibu 7y ago"the goal is to slow not stop" The goal is for it to stop. But anything that slows it down, is good.
- turdnagel 7y agoThe only actors in the position to help here are the carriers and platform owners. Perhaps a joint venture between Apple and Google to hold each other accountable? I don't trust the carriers to get this right.
- __s 7y agoHow should one know which regions have health officials using this? Asking as a Canadian
- cjbprime 7y agoSingapore's doing contact tracing without any location data, and with contact between devices encrypted until needed for a contact disclosure. Seems like a better approach to me: https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/asia-pacific/singapore-government-launches-new-app-contact-tracing-combat-spread-covid-19 https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/asia-pacific/singapore-g...
- divbzero 7y agoThis sounds like Apple’s Find My feature with location stripped out. Still, location could be useful for individuals without smartphones or who have newly installed the app.
- joelkek 7y agoYeah GPS casts too wide a net (imagine being in New York- everyone in a 80-story office building would be within margin of error of a single GPS point). Bluetooth seems like a better solution, and the Singapore one does it in a privacy-preserving way while storing all data on the phone. Only when a user is infected, then are they asked to upload data. https://tracetogether.gov.sg https://tracetogether.gov.sg
- ryanisnan 7y agoHow does this work if one has a bluetooth receiver off?
- true_religion 7y agoIt doesn’t. It also doesn’t cover people without phones, like most children. Or people with feature phones that don’t have Bluetooth. Yet it’s still better than nothing.
- johnnyAghands 7y agoUsing Bluetooth to detect potential contact + plus GPS seem like a good way to cover a lot of ground. Anyways I feel like the bigger issue is the huge honeypot problem. I think it's easier to assume data like this is bound to leak -- so what can we do to make it useless besides for its intended purpose? I mean it doesn't have to protect against like a state backed program to track an individual -- but it should protect against the usual bullshit companies like insurance or scammers.... hmmm
- LordOfWolves 7y agoSadly, I do not see Private Kit reaching anywhere close to the critical mass required for it to be fully effective, unless all Americans are required to use it per a new federal mandate, which I cannot see becoming a reality given the incompetency clearly exhibited by one or more of our "leaders" over the past several days (if not much longer)..
- cat199 7y agoso, you're saying not requiring mandatory location tracking of all citizens is 'incompetence'? also: who is going to buy everyone smartphones and ensure they are properly registered/configured? there are many potential ways to reduce the spread, even within an 'authoritarian mandated government' context, without this level of intrusiveness.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoYes, By staying home, washing our hands, and not going out onto beaches and partying. Anyone found breaking the rules should be charged with biological assault.
- perl4ever 7y agoIt's being taken for granted that nearly everybody (Cuomo just said 80%) is going to get it, so it doesn't make sense to get angry at someone for increasing your risk of catching it. The efforts to slow the spread are about giving the healthcare system time to cope. So, yes, people are being antisocial if they don't follow the rules but it's not sane to treat it like you're personally being assaulted. This isn't ebola or HIV.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> The efforts to slow the spread are about giving the healthcare system time to cope. So, yes, people are being antisocial if they don't follow the rules but it's not sane to treat it like you're personally being assaulted. This isn't ebola or HIV. No. It should be treated as attempted mass murder. Because this is what it boils down to: one idiot causing a bunch of deaths downstream, plus some more by contributing to overloading healthcare.
- perl4ever 7y agoThe impact of global warming is estimated at 150,000 fatalities[1] per year currently, which so far is significantly more than the epidemic. Do you think that automobile drivers should be treated as "attempted mass murderers"? It is even the same people telling us about that and coronavirus - the WHO. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-and-health/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-an...
- nixenboxen 7y agoThis is a false equivalence and you and everyone else who keeps making it know it. It makes zero sense to say that the current number of deaths is less than deaths from climate change or cars because those deaths aren't (at the moment) rapidly increasing exponentially. Do you think the deaths will just magically stop? What people apparently forget is that mortality rates jump (for everything) when your healthcare system collapses, as it did in Northern Italy, as it is about to in New York, and as it will everywhere else in a week or two because of flippant attitudes like yours.
- sbohacek 7y agoInstead of using GPS, consider using the WiFi base stations. Specifically, each location can be characterized by the set of WiFi base stations a phone can detect. GPS is useful while outdoors, but virus transmission is somewhat difficult outdoors. Indoors, a conference room on the third floor and the 40th floor will have the same GPS coordinates, but a phone in each location will detect a different set of WIFI based stations. This paper shows how WiFi base stations can be used https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.04730.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.04730.pdf. I might not understand methods to achieve privacy, but here are some thoughts. 1. The data could be stored more safely with something like Intel SGX, where only the application can access the data. In this scenario, the carrier (or healthcare worker), uploads the carrier’s path into SGX-based database. Then, individual users that are concerned about their risk could use the app to upload their location paths into the SGX-based system and learn if they are at risk as a simple yes/no. (I have never built an SGX application, so I might be mistaken on its abilities.) 2. I don’t think this is possible: “The solution is a ‘pull’ model where users can download encrypted location information about carriers” If the application is on my device, I can decompile it and get the decryption key or use other methods to dump the carriers’ location data to disk. 3. It seems that the user’s data is also stored on the device. This data is then at risk of being stolen by malicious applications. Instead, the location data can be encrypted with a public key that can only be decrypted on the SGX-protected servers.
- ecoqba11 7y agoThat MIT site is not forcing HTTPS and the link above is using HTTP. Talking about security...
- mderazon 7y agoIsrael's ministry of health has released a similar app [1] (open source [2]). Location is stored locally, and cross checked with confirmed covid-19 patients location history. You get a notification if you were close to a patient (1) https://medium.com/@oleiba/hamagen-fight-coronavirus-and-preserve-privacy-b1631693bb46 https://medium.com/@oleiba/hamagen-fight-coronavirus-and-pre... (2) https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native
- zackb 7y agoA friend of mine is working on this privacy oriented data collection app: https://www.coepi.org https://www.coepi.org
- xenonite 7y agoI don’t think this is reliable enough if you like to stay safe while being out, although it seems better than nothing. Considering that aerosols are a plausible infection vector, it becomes necessary to introduce air flow models that include building ventilations for a reliable outcome of location based monitoring. Honestly, I consider this a major, and quite risky undertaking. Already a retrospective analysis of who-infected-whom based on location will turn out quite incomplete. As a side note while being quarantined at home: please consider closing building ventilations, talk to your neighbor to coordinate asynchronous window opening procedures, and ensure closed sewage systems. Why do I come to these conclusions? 1. It is plausible that SARS-CoV-2 behaves like SARS-CoV-1 in aerosol transmission. https://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc2004973 https://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc2004973 2. It took quite an effort to find out how SARS-CoV-1 spreaded from one single flat to other flats and to nearby buildings that were located in the direction of wind. Indeed, it is assumed that sewage ventilation played a role here. https://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa032867 https://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa032867
- gjs278 7y agohi i’m your neighbor would you like to coordinate our window openings? fucking lol
- dennisy 7y agoSorry for what is probably a silly question, but are you saying someone can be infected through an open window?
- jmalicki 7y agoIn the second study, they are claiming that people were infected through their building's ventilation.
- xenonite 7y agoYes, please see the discussion in the second study. They cite the findings of an investigative team of the WHO for the infections in the same building, and add their own findings to explain infections other buildings (which the WHO didn't explain). And yes, both the WHO and the study states open windows as inlets for the aerosols. In my opinion, this also explains the measures in China: here a whole building is evacuated and quarantined if one single person in the building is tested positive.
- simmanian 7y agoI had been a staunch advocate of not sharing any personal information wherever possible, but recently I've been thinking whether I've approached the whole privacy issue from a wrong angle. Maybe there isn't anything wrong with sharing our data and information for the public good. After all, we almost view it self-evident that transparency is good for communities at large. The real issue is that most of the parties who come after our data are only interested in exploiting us to make more money. Given this thought, I believe I would be inclined to share my data with orgs that I know are trying to do public good in a verifiable and transparent way.
- macspoofing 7y ago>Maybe there isn't anything wrong with sharing our data and information for the public good Define 'public good'. Is counter-terrorism a 'public good' ... for example?
- contravariant 7y agoVerifiable and transparent are very much the key words there. Currently the only way to share personal information is to basically just hand it someone you think should be trustworthy, who does god knows what with it. And that's if you even get that level of control, and whomever you handed your data previously isn't sharing it on your behalf.
- slavik81 7y agoThe problem is that you can't take the data back when good organizations turn bad. Maybe you trusted the US government in 1940 when you took the census, but in 1942 they showed up at your door to take you away if you had listed yourself as Japanese. If you lived in the Netherlands in the 1930s, you may have had a great deal of trust in your government. They collected extensive population data and did a lot of good with it. When the Nazis invaded, they got access to the same systems. It made their genocide much more effective than in neighbouring countries.
- zxienin 7y agoMaking provision in the application, to take back the data - will go long way.
- gojomo 7y agoSeparate from the "current crisis" and retrospective contact-tracing: Are there any existing apps that keep a high-resolution trail of where you've been, without ever uploading it to the cloud? (Or, only uploading it to a location you choose, encrypted to a key you hold?) Something like Google "Location History", but without Google or any other intermediary data-silos who could be compromised to reveal my data against my wishes.
- bravoetch 7y agoOpentracks is an Android app that you could do this with.
- ray991 7y agoI think this is the right way - store data but publish it publically when you are confirmed with coronavirus. Then apps installed on others phones would automatically see your data and would do an intersect to see if they were in proximity, and notify you accordingly. This way only the data of those impacted by coronavirus becomes public. And although it’s public technically, as the app has access to it behind the scenes, but legally you won’t be allowed to reverse engineer the response data and publish it online on a map,etc. so that adds some privacy from the general public’s eyes.
- divbzero 7y agoFor HN folks at Apple or Google, are there efforts internally to incorporate this or something similar into Android and iOS updates? It will have to be a collaboration between the two companies.
- brigandish 7y agoErm… what is it? Forgive me for not wanting to download the PDF to find out, but I can't for the life of me work out why there isn't an opening paragraph explaining what it is, and I'm too old for guessing games. This is the second link from HN I've opened today like this.
- jessriedel 7y agoAnyone know enough to compare to CovidWatch from folks at Stanford, about to be released? https://www.covid-watch.org/ https://www.covid-watch.org/ I think CovidWatch has the privacy focus of SafePaths and the Bluetooth mechanism of TracePaths (the Singapore app)?
- honzzz 7y agoCzech volunteer group Covid19cz involving some big Czech companies and in cooperation with the Czech government are going to launch their tracking system which they claim is GDPR compliant, based on experiences learned from other countries like South Korea and packaged to be rolled out to other countries. I am not associated with them, I just think it is worth mentioning here. https://bit.ly/394M4w3 https://bit.ly/394M4w3
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- freddyym 7y agoWhile I like the concept, doesn't the fact that the site isn't using https defeat the purpose?
- devrimdemiroz 7y agoTried to consolidate the list... (Orig: https://github.com/devrimdemiroz/contactTracing#singapore https://github.com/devrimdemiroz/contactTracing#singapore) Singapore tracetogether https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/ https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/ Opensource: Announced to be opensource but when? Related news: https://str.sg/Jfup https://str.sg/Jfup Almost the most pouplar, 735K users Bluetooth based, no location information collected. As stated in their official site “The app doesn't identify “where” the exposure to COVID-19 cases may have occurred. It only seeks to establish “who” else might have been exposed to the virus.” Israel Hamagen (The Shield) https://govextra.gov.il/ministry-of-health/hamagen-app/download-en/ https://govextra.gov.il/ministry-of-health/hamagen-app/downl... Opensource: https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native Israel's Ministry of Health's COVID-19 Exposure Prevention App Architecture: https://proferopublic.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/5f72cff6-0fb5-4517-9941-99331819b5a0/profero_infographic_01_en.jpg https://proferopublic.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/5f72cff6-0f... USA safepaths http://safepaths.mit.edu/ http://safepaths.mit.edu/ Opensource: https://github.com/tripleblindmarket/ https://github.com/tripleblindmarket/ Based on Private Kit by MIT, core code is ready but still in early stages React-native based Android and IOS clients Location and bluetooth based covid-watch https://www.covid-watch.org/collaborate.html https://www.covid-watch.org/collaborate.html Notihng developed so far, in organization/establishment phase Italy diAry https://covid19app.uniurb.it/ https://covid19app.uniurb.it/ Opensource: Announced to be opensource by April'20 Additional feature worth to mention is reward system Germany geoHealthApp https://www.geohealthapp.de/ https://www.geohealthapp.de/ Opensource: NO Czech Smart quarantine https://medium.com/@pabu01/covid19cz-update-bb7e12e71d9e https://medium.com/@pabu01/covid19cz-update-bb7e12e71d9e Opensource: NO Based on Telco data Turkey coronapp -https://coronapp.tech/ https://coronapp.tech/ Opensource: NO Guvendekal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3TFkT4Zmgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3TFkT4Zmgg Mentioned in above link, yet to be developed coronawarner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3TFkT4Zmgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3TFkT4Zmgg Mentioned in above link, yet to be developed China Alipay WeChat Korea Corona 100m (Co100) Taiwan