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It's quite horrible if it becomes a standard API. What a gold mine it is for ad business to be able to tell which groups of people are together. It can be used

by Geee 7y ago

It's quite horrible if it becomes a standard API. What a gold mine it is for ad business to be able to tell which groups of people are together. It can be used to track 'idea spreading' as well.

nickromano 7y ago
Sounds like this will only be available for approved public organizations. > First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.
azinman2 7y ago
Of course it’s potentially rife with abusive power. And we need to make sure that this is a very temporary thing (admittedly it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle). That said, you can’t advertise to the dead. There’s a very real need here, and some governments are off doing this on their own anyway. I do believe that at least Apple and Google combined can come up with a solution that has some amount of privacy protection that a state actor would never bother with themselves.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > admittedly it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle On iOS, entitlements?
  - azinman2 7y ago
    I meant that once this capability is out there, people will point to it and say “see it can be done. Now do this, it’s law.”
tastroder 7y ago
The whole point of this is to not enable these abuses, see https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact-tracing/pdf/ContactTracing-CryptographySpecification.pdf https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu... The nefarious ad actor can do far more with the existing stack.