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How Apple And Google Are Going To Enable Contact Tracing
- transfire 7y ago5 times a second? That seems excessive, and a waste of power.
- djaychela 7y agoI wouldn't think it is excessive - if you're cycling and pass someone then the contact period would be very brief (but if you're passing through their sneeze cloud then it could be critical).
- merricksb 7y agoHuge discussion about this topic one-two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834959 (805 points, 459 comments)
- panarky 7y agoNot a dupe. This article explains in detail how the contact tracing API can work while preserving privacy. Random identifiers not linked to you or your device, identifiers change every 10 minutes so third parties can't track you over time, processing locally on the device instead of by Apple or Google or the government, etc.
- syshum 7y ago>>how the contact tracing API can work while preserving privacy. It cant, and any claims it can is sheer arrogance on the part of the developers. you can not simultaneously assign an identifier to everyone, and maintain privacy, they are mutually exclusive. If you can ID someone, and trace that ID back then it is not private
- DagAgren 7y agoWell good news: This system does not assign an identifier to everyone, so it works.
- sasasassy 7y agoPrivate until someone flags someone or everyone as infected.
- DagAgren 7y agoThat is not a possible.
- syshum 7y agoIt absolutely does, and broadcasts it via BlueTooth, then other phones track which ID's you have been near. The idea that can not be used for something other than COVID is moronic, this type of system has been done in Marketing for a long time, Google knows this very well. This is not a new or novel idea, nor it is private
- DagAgren 7y agoIt does not transmit "an ID". It transmits random IDs, that cycle often.
- syshum 7y agoExcept for people that Test Positive, which then it uploads each of the Daily Tracing keys to a central server for each of the day you were positive, this is reversible, and has to be in order to identify all of the contacts the person came in contact with you can not have an anonymous system that also provides aways to trace back to individuals you came in contact with it is impossible and their complex Hash of hashes is just a way to make it seems private for people that do not understand what is really going on, it sounds good on the surface, but that is all it is surface level that is with out getting into the ways to compromise the device to get the original Tracking key that all of the other tracking keys are generated from
- ReactiveJelly 7y ago> third parties can't track you over time I thought having a third party track everyone over time was the entire point of contact tracing?
- mikece 7y agoVoluntary compliance for public health today; mandatory compliance by government edict tomorrow -- or we flag your account and you're prohibited from buying anything. And what if I chose to stop using a smart phone and just use a flip phone that doesn't have Bluetooth? Am I a de facto enemy of public health (or just public enemy)? Anyone else see this as a MASSIVE slippery slope with too much potential for exploitation?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y agoThis was my first thought. Feels like an NSA goal, to build a web of association for everyone in the country.
- mikece 7y agoThat's what makes no sense at all: the CIA and NSA have been running social network graph systems for years; they know who talks to whom and what the social circles are. The only thing this does is answer who gets within proximity of another... something the NSA and others can probably do already with pervasive video surveillance and biometric identification. This project seems like a massive overreach and I won't be taking part, even if it means pulling the SIM from my iPhone and using a flip phone until sanity returns (or for the rest of my life).
- taborj 7y agoI have several wrenches in my toolbox. But if someone is going to give me a new one, I'm gonna accept it. That's the same idea here; sure, maybe the CIA and NSA already have the capability. But what's the harm in having it twice? There's actually benefits from the aspect of checking one against the other, not to mention one may reveal something the other doesn't. I'm not saying this is what will happen. I'm simply saying that power seeks more power.
- cosmodisk 7y agoI absolutely do so. Because of the current virus situation, there will be many shady laws and practices passed with a simple excuse. https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fhkcw8/what_are_we_all_missing_right_now_because_it_gets/ https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fhkcw8/what_are_...
- tgv 7y agoSeems better than what I came up with, but one of my issues with Bluetooth is: how would you determine distance? Power? Also: that central server has got to be pretty powerful.
- justzisguyuknow 7y agoYeah I don't want to be commanded to self-isolate because I was 25 feet away from a stranger in a park...
- shadowgovt 7y agoOh, I definitely do. That's a huge improvement over the current status quo where I contracted COVID-19 from passing a stranger in a park, have no idea I've done so because I thought that I was doing a good job of self isolation and never even saw that person, and two weeks later I'm wildly ill and have already infected everyone in my household. More information gives me more tools to protect myself and those I love.
- stephenheron 7y agoI wonder if they could reduce the power to the Bluetooth chipset to artificially reduce the range? Might be possible with iOS devices as it's pretty easy to test each of them. Harder to do with the 1000s of Android devices that exist.
- tsherr 7y agoI keep Bluetooth disabled when I'm not using it. What happens then? I knew crap like this was going to happen. Hello Big Brother.
- alanbernstein 7y agoMaybe using the system is optional, but it gets you into the high priority group when you're waiting in line for hospital access
- hcurtiss 7y agoThis is precisely what worries me. Submit to big brother, or you’re a second class citizen.
- shadowgovt 7y agoYou say that as if avoiding having a driver's license and credit card for privacy reasons doesn't already cause huge complications in an American's day-to-day life.
- alanbernstein 7y agoDon't forget the third option: ignore high-consensus advice from health experts, contract a novel deadly disease, and spread it, become seriously ill, or die.
- Teever 7y agoIf a pandemic doesn't strike you as the appropriate time to temporarily cede some personal rights then what situation does, exactly?
- IAmEveryone 7y ago> What happens then? Nothing. Except a slightly elevated chance of getting infected. Remember: The goal is not to (make your Grandmother) die for your cause, but to make the virus die for their ill-calibrated conspiracy theory.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Aeolun 7y agoI don’t understand why we go through all this trouble? If we’re talking about Apple and Google they already have all information about where the majority of people have been (everyone that didn’t explicitly turn off their location tracking services). It also doesn’t require anyone to install an app...
- alanbernstein 7y agoHow do Google and apple access each others' data?
- simion314 7y agoMaybe the world is more then the USA, so if in country X a doctor finds a person with something and he wants to warn all the people this person had contact with, this doctor would have to ask nicely Google and Apple to grep trough logs and find who meet who and where? Would Google and Apple respond to a doctor in a small country? You can have a national app that is under the control of the health department and doctors ,t hat only does things like "send a notification to all users that were in contact with person with this ID to come to hospital and get a test". I understand that this could be potentially abused for evil or that evil people already do this using WiFi or cell towers, I am thinking that we should also think at the good that could come of this.
- arrrg 7y agoNo they don’t. Nobody has data that granular and fit for purpose. If my purpose-built wirst watch shows me veering dozens of meters of course even if I explicitly tell it to precisely track my location then that’s not fit for purpose.
- panarky 7y agoGPS isn't very accurate indoors. BLE only has a range of 20 meters or so indoors.
- RestAndVest 7y agoHow about letting nature take it's course? They didn't have Google Apple and Facebook before and we survived plagues that make Covid look like a joke.
- stilley2 7y agoPrivacy issues aside, if the 10 minute key is only 16bits, and this is being used by hundreds of millions of people, wouldn't there be a lot of false positives?
- tantalor 7y agoThe size of the graph doesn't matter, only the average vertex degree, which should be pretty low if you are social distant, because you only share identifiers with nearby people.
- stilley2 7y agoBut wouldn't that mean the list of infected keys would have to be location-indicated in some way? I guess I was under the impression it would be one list for the country.
- tantalor 7y agoI see, that's a good point. The article implies the "infected" list is global, not location specific.
- nokcha 7y agoIt's 16 bytes, not 16 bits.
- stilley2 7y agoAh I misread. That definitely fixes the problem!
- pjc50 7y agoIt's going to be a problem to get rid of it later .. but right now we can barely go outside! It's not a simple tradeoff between tracking and no tracking, it's a tradeoff between tracking and lockdown. US deaths just passed 22k, over seven times 9/11 and over four times the total Iraq war death toll. It is likely we will see five to ten times that total number before the pandemic is ended. People have been happily arguing to let the old die as a means to end the lockdown. How about cellphone tracking instead? (And remember that every cellphone knows your approximate location by necessity of which cell you're connected to.)
- blisterpeanuts 7y agoFraming this as an either/or choice (surrender some privacy or the elderly die) is a reductio ad absurdum. There are easier and less blatantly intrusive ways of achieving 80% or 90% of the mitigation, like for example a combination of nonstop education of the public and issuing tickets for breaking social distancing rules as is being done in some places. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans passively accepted huge intrusions on privacy that have still not been rolled back, 19 years later. We should be very careful what we wish for. This tracking thing is a very slippery slope.
- shadowgovt 7y agoWhat are your sources on nonstop education plus tickets being sufficient to get to 80% / 90% mitigation?
- dasKrokodil 7y agoTotal Iraq war death toll is in the hundreds of thousands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
- joncrane 7y agoWon't this cause false positives from people, for example, walking in front of my house while I'm inside, and also while for example, stopped at a stoplight next to other cars?
- shadowgovt 7y agoLikely yes. The system will need some fine-tuning to achieve its goals.
- paul_f 7y agoWhat a vast understatement
- shadowgovt 7y agoThere's an interesting article on Vox regarding how this all fits into a larger plan for getting Americans out of their homes (https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/10/21215494/coronavirus-plans-social-distancing-economy-recession-depression-unemployment https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/10/21215494/coronavi...). The tl;dr is that at least in the context of a pandemic like this one, lack of access to a smartphone and lack of willingness to enable tracking puts a person in the new second-class-citizen category. It's not the stick that government would use to restrict freedom; it's the carrot of granting more freedom to those who are more trusting of authority. Not only do I personally not see much of a way around that scenario, the Vox article notes it's entirely possible that Americans' general mistrust of authority means the country may recover more slowly and painfully than nations that are willing to let the government data-tag and monitor everyone. At what point does the value of participating in society and the economy outweigh the value of one's privacy? It seems this question is going to rapidly become even more non-academic than it already is.