10 ms·

Contact Tracing in the Real World

118 points by nmjenkins 6y ago

jfoster 6y ago
If I go outside, I would like to have an app that does this on my phone. My "right to privacy" isn't worth putting other peoples' health at considerable risk for. There isn't even a scenario I could imagine where one of these apps would do something that I would consider a severe infringement of my privacy. A few million lives may ultimately hang in the balance, so there ought to be a very compelling argument against not putting these apps into practice and getting ahead of coronavirus.
- gargs 6y ago
  Some would argue that willfully going outside while you’re infected is the more risky and irresponsible behavior on your part.
  - jfoster 6y ago
    The whole idea is that the app would alert you if you may be infected so that you don't go out. The problem is that sometimes people who don't yet know they are infected have contact with other people before anyone in the story finds out that they are infected. The apps allow the communication to happen: 1. Even if the people who had contact don't know each other. 2. Faster. That's how we get ahead of the virus.
    - dchyrdvh 6y ago
      Is this all this tracking achieves? I personally assume that I'm infected until proven otherwise. Even if proven, I can get infected a day later. I don't need a tracker to tell me this.
    - gargs 6y ago
      Contact tracing is a precursor to testing. An app flagging you as a potential positive doesn’t mean that you self-quarantine for x days, rather it means that you get tested asap. And this has to happen every time you get flagged. Otherwise there’s just no point in using those apps. Eventually the entire neighborhood would be flagged. Not sure what the downvote is for.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  The US is predicting 60k deaths. Millions is quite an exaggeration. Would you still give up your privacy to save a few thousand lives?
  - andruby 6y ago
    60k deaths in the US on a population of 330M, guess how much that would mean for the world? 7700M/330M * 60K = 1.4M. OP is absolutely right. Countries with lower standard of healthcare than the US will have a higher death rate.
    - graeme 6y ago
      It’s also surely an undercount in the US. We’ll get accurate numbers when all cause mortality comes out. In Europe the totals were underestimated by a factor of two in most countries. For example, in NYC, this chart shows roughly 5500 excess deaths on april 4th. Whereas on that day nyc had only counted 3500 coronavirus deaths. https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1248905714124414976/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1248905714124414976/...
    - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
      The US is an extreme example, their news stations were downplaying it and calling it a hoax, they didn't follow social distancing in most places until it was too late, they were late to the "this is not the flu" party by a month and grossly incompetent leadership combined with the CDC literally lying to its people === the perfect storm. Further, those numbers are based on NYC hospitals being completely overwhelmed which sky rocketed the death rate. If a country can flatten their curve what is happening in New York doesn't have to happen again.
      - acdha 6y ago
        “Fox and OAN” are not the same as “news stations”. If you got your news anywhere else this was reported accurately by the middle of January[1] and there were plenty of experts calling for social distancing by February. The decision to politicize medicine will go down in history’s list of bad calls but it’s a function of the right-wing propaganda network, not the news media or public health experts. 1. Yes, there was that dweeb with the NYT opinion piece saying it wasn’t worse than the flu. There’s a reason that ran in the opinion section.
- epistasis 6y ago
  If you are concerned about this, the app is the least of your worries because BLE and MAC addresses are already being used to track your movements, for commercial purposes. For example inside stores. Additionally, many many apps silently gather and sell this data, without your knowledge, and with "consent" being ignored or being relegated to privacy statements that are too vague to understand that they are doing this. I really hope that if people are concerned at all in any way about the tracking app mentioned here that they also learn that such tracking is being used extensively in industry right now. I'm surprised how few people on HN seem to know this. If any audience should know and warn our friends and neighbors, it's the audience at HN.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    So we get the reverse of the reasonable behavior. People - and I mean tech people, not Joes and Janes Random - freak out over using movement tracking to fight a pandemic, while they willingly accept the same tech being used by advertisers. It's like people want to suffer.
- jstanley 6y ago
  Conversely, you could argue that your "right to health" isn't worth putting other people's privacy at considerable risk for.
  - jfoster 6y ago
    You have no privacy to protect if you are not alive.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  by all means, you are free to make this tradeoff for yourself. but you don't get to decide what other people's privacy should be worth to them. > There isn't even a scenario I could imagine where one of these apps would do something that I would consider a severe infringement of my privacy. do you live in the united states? there have been quite a few privacy fiascos in the last couple decades that the general public found unimaginable until they were exposed.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Going a step beyond the info in the blog post, there's a documentary on Youtube showing how in S. Korea, there are apps to see the paths of corona patients so you can avoid those areas: Covid-19 in S. Korea @5:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c My opinion is those apps work because S. Korea remembers SARS-1 (2002/2003), and people there are cooperative. Also, if you do full contact tracing early enough, there aren't an overwhelming number of patients like NY. S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above. (S. Korea had the same problem as Toronto with SARS-1, where the hospital doctors and nurses were wiped out by the first few cases. In S. Korea, it was the first SARS-1 patient wandering around town like a cruise missile to several doctors and hospitals that spread the disease, as nobody identified the magnitude of the problem.) > And how will things work with an orderly supermarket queue, where law-abiding people stand patiently six feet apart? In the SF Bay Area, here's how social distancing works at grocery stores: 1) one entrance/exit with security guards at the door 2) queue outside with shoppers 6' apart 3) only 50 people allowed in at one time, but distance is not enforced in the store except 6' in checkout lanes. However, American grocery stores are large, so the spirit is being followed. Recently, I've seen saran wrap over POS terminals. Bank ATMs also need that prophylactic. :) 4) shoppers are responsible for washing their carts and hands, which is a gap.
- dfsegoat 6y ago
  S. Korea, as I understand it, also assigned a trained case worker to every single case or suspected COVID case. This enabled the contact tracing to be quite successful, and something I believe we’ll need to emulate in the US to prevent the next outbreak in the fall.
- sfj 6y ago
  > S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above. Taiwan has also done so. It has a similar story, burned by SARS, also. https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En
  - maxerickson 6y ago
pintxo 6y ago
Some interesting thoughts: > First, it isn’t anonymous ... I believe this is a miss understanding. We loose anonymity once someone is diagnosed, there is no way around that. But we should not skip on anonymity for everyone else. Else this whole project is doomed by the onset as we are simply building a massive 1984 style infrastructure. > Second, contact tracers have access to all sorts of other data such as public transport ticketing and credit-card records ... Which is debatable, but not a major problem as long as this is a largely manual ad-hoc process regulated by law and so expensive to execute that we only do it during emergency situations. It's totally different once we start building systems and processes around this to make it cheap and it ends as the new normal. > Third, you can’t wait for diagnoses. ... Surely a problem we need to improve upon. Likely a major logistics problem? Maybe something we should ask the military to take a look, after all logistics is something they might have an idea how to do right. > Fourth, the public health authorities need geographical data for purposes other than contact tracing ... Why would this need to be part of contract tracing? Currently this is done based on confirmed cases. Surely they are largely localized, especially since the stay-home orders. > Fifth, although the cryptographers – and now Google and Apple – are discussing more anonymous variants of the Singapore app, that’s not the problem. ... I agree, trolling, denial of service and school kids are going to be a problem. Could likely be solved by adding a formal gate for infected. Signing the test result with a public-private key scheme should do the trick to prevent any non-legitimate results being used to trigger events. > Sixth, there’s the human aspect. Interestingly I would have said this is the technology aspect. How many contacts will we miss because bluetooth low energy is not up to the job? > Seventh, on the systems front, decentralised systems are all very nice in theory but are a complete pain in practice as they’re too hard to update. ... Relying on cryptography tends to make things even more complex, fragile and hard to change. Seems solvable, considering we are talking about mobile apps, mostly always online, managed through central app stores and servers? Sounds doable. > But the real killer is likely to be the interaction between privacy and economics. If the app’s voluntary, nobody has an incentive to use it, except tinkerers and people who religiously comply with whatever the government asks. Tend to agree, although we have seen quite some adherence to sensible rules the last couple of weeks. Maybe we will be surprised by our fellow humans, maybe not.
- antpls 6y ago
kiwidrew 6y ago
I applaud the efforts to investigate whether smartphone technology can be a useful aid in the contact tracing process. Privacy aside, it seems to me that there are two main issues that Bluetooth-beaconing-smartphones will struggle to solve: 1. Determining whether two smartphones "hearing" each other's beacon constitutes contact between the owners of those smartphones. (The blog post we're discussing brings up several examples, and the "orderly supermarket queue" of shoppers patiently waiting outside while observing a 2m distance could generate a massive number of false positives.) 2. Ensuring widespread adoption. If only 1/6th of the population is participating (which are the numbers Singapore is seeing so far) then the chance that an encounter between two people is captured by the app is 1/36th -- far too low to be of much use. There is also an upper limit to adoption because not everyone owns a smartphone or has a device which would be compatible with the contact tracing app.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  I wouldn't call being within 2m of a contaminated person a "false positive". I don't think these distances are absolutely safe and it's impossible to say exactly what interactions occured. The data from Bluetooth beacons are probably as good as is possible to get.
  - kiwidrew 6y ago
    In an open space (such as a supermarket carpark) the Bluetooth LE range could easily be 10-20 meters. So one person standing in the queue could potentially be considered a contact of the 5+ people in front of them plus the 5+ people behind them. If you're not prepared to test all of those people (and potentially multiple times) then what action should the potential contacts take? Should they all isolate themselves for 14 days because they were in the same carpark as a confirmed case for a few minutes?
    - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
      presumably that is a pretty accurate sample of people likely to be infected by me. All the shoppers in the supermarket while I am (and shortly afterwards) are at risk of picking up the satsumas I fondled too much etc. (to be clear, I'm operating a 'touch means take' policy, but its clear through simple observation that most aren't capable of thinking through the rule (or even following it))
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tcd 6y ago
Not trying to be cynical, but to me this seems to be a way to get the mass public "okay" with contact tracing. Then somehow they "mysteriously" manage to get more accurate information from other sources (location, wifi beacons, data sharing etc). But they'll just say "the information is only from this source, we pinky promise!".
buboard 6y ago
I think the author is correct that people are missing the forest here. I know plenty of people that would have no problem with public tracing of patients (myself included), but it wouldn't be effective in stopping the virus here. And not because the app's uptake would be small - people are dying to do something , anything, so they 'd download it. Maybe singaporeans did not download it because they feel already protected enough by their health system, but westerners feel so unprotected by them that they buy TP by the metric ton. S.Korea and singapore/hong kong, those are densely populated areas/cities with specific movement patterns among people and enough tehcnology infrastructure to know what do something useful with the tracing information. In some western cities, tracing would end up giving people constant alarms that they might be infected, and that information wouldn't really be actionable or at least you coulnd't trust that people would act on it. Western cities have no memory of other plagues either. Perhaps goverments should reward distancing and testing instead of punishing offenders. Perhaps even pubs could open, provided they serve the same group of 10 people every monday. Western cities will need to figure out their own policies until a cure is found, and they have to reflect their own character - you can't just copy asian policies praying that they work.
rubidium 6y ago
Here’s the real deal. I’m quite privacy conscious. Hate tracking of any type, esp. for some mega corps profit. That said, I’d gladly install a decent security verified app that tracks me for the next 3 months. I’d be happy to self isolate again with my family (as we’re doing now) if I came in contact with someone. But the big issues are: - ensure tracking is available only to those who need it and doesn’t get shared with any commercial interest. - my employer supports WFH or short term paid sick leave (maybe with gov’t assistance) for those 14 days. Get those two things and I think the majority of the US population would opt in. That would be sufficient. Sure there’s some risk that people are infected who won’t opt in. But that opt in system of “we’re all in this together” is much better than a forced gov’t tracking system.
slothtrop 6y ago
I'm disappointed that some I've come across are trying to cast SK's measures as tyrannical, as though it's not authoritarian to shut down the economy and force everyone to stay home. Cooperating with contact tracing is a lesser temporary loss of freedom than not working. It's not even clear to me to what extent it helped, all the articles I've read repeatedly state that early testing in itself has been the deciding factor. In theory then, if the infection rate were temporarily quashed, couldn't this be implemented? And both sides of the political spectrum are behaving this way, the right-wing downplays the risk and postures that a lockdown will lead to a worse outcome, and many dems pretend a lockdown is the only thing that could have realistically been done, looking to SK like "oh, well they're draconian, that could never happen".
hcurtiss 6y ago
When did “flatten the curve” become “eliminate transmission”? We have abundant hospital capacity remaining nearly everywhere up in the US. It seems likely we can begin moving toward herd immunity significantly more quickly by relaxing social distancing standards and quarantining sensitive populations, all while remaining below the horizontal line. It’s not worth surrendering civil liberties, something we’ve sacrificed many lives to preserve.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Agreed. Also, due to the indiscriminate cancellation of "elective" surgeries (which include things like bone marrow transplants), my mother's hospital is slower than normal! They're facing a funding crunch as a result and may need to cut staff. This is the insanity of centralized policy making when the distribution of impact is not even in all districts.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Define "sensitive populations". Also, define how you (effectively!) quarantine sensitive populations with less impact on civil liberties than testing and contact tracing of the general population (which has modest privacy implications that can be reasonably managed).
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Sweden isn’t doing a half bad job of it (1). Sure they have more cases than Norway but they certainly don’t have exponential growth. (1) https://www.aier.org/article/what-sweden-has-done-right-on-coronavirus/ https://www.aier.org/article/what-sweden-has-done-right-on-c...
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    by definition, sensitive populations face the greatest personal risk from violating the quarantine. most of them would probably comply if the government merely asked them. it's hard to see how contact tracing of the general population can be done with "modest" privacy implications, unless it's opt-in.
dchyrdvh 6y ago
Apple, Google, Facebook already track everyone and everything they can: all these gps, wifi, Bluetooth and even ultrasound trackers built into smartphones exist only for one purpose. After all, they are in the business of building accurate user profiles and selling ads to them. What they do need is ability to do this openly, so they're trying to leverage the epidemics to legalize their business (ATM it's in the grey area: kinda legal, but amoral).

118 points by nmjenkins 6y ago

If I go outside, I would like to have an app that does this on my phone. My "right to privacy" isn't worth putting other peoples' health at considerable risk for. There isn't even a scenario I could imagine where one of these apps would do something that I would consider a severe infringement of my privacy. A few million lives may ultimately hang in the balance, so there ought to be a very compelling argument against not putting these apps into practice and getting ahead of coronavirus.

gargs 6y ago
Some would argue that willfully going outside while you’re infected is the more risky and irresponsible behavior on your part.
- jfoster 6y ago
  The whole idea is that the app would alert you if you may be infected so that you don't go out. The problem is that sometimes people who don't yet know they are infected have contact with other people before anyone in the story finds out that they are infected. The apps allow the communication to happen: 1. Even if the people who had contact don't know each other. 2. Faster. That's how we get ahead of the virus.
  - dchyrdvh 6y ago
    Is this all this tracking achieves? I personally assume that I'm infected until proven otherwise. Even if proven, I can get infected a day later. I don't need a tracker to tell me this.
  - gargs 6y ago
    Contact tracing is a precursor to testing. An app flagging you as a potential positive doesn’t mean that you self-quarantine for x days, rather it means that you get tested asap. And this has to happen every time you get flagged. Otherwise there’s just no point in using those apps. Eventually the entire neighborhood would be flagged. Not sure what the downvote is for.
mrfusion 6y ago
The US is predicting 60k deaths. Millions is quite an exaggeration. Would you still give up your privacy to save a few thousand lives?
- andruby 6y ago
  60k deaths in the US on a population of 330M, guess how much that would mean for the world? 7700M/330M * 60K = 1.4M. OP is absolutely right. Countries with lower standard of healthcare than the US will have a higher death rate.
  - graeme 6y ago
    It’s also surely an undercount in the US. We’ll get accurate numbers when all cause mortality comes out. In Europe the totals were underestimated by a factor of two in most countries. For example, in NYC, this chart shows roughly 5500 excess deaths on april 4th. Whereas on that day nyc had only counted 3500 coronavirus deaths. https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1248905714124414976/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1248905714124414976/...
  - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
    The US is an extreme example, their news stations were downplaying it and calling it a hoax, they didn't follow social distancing in most places until it was too late, they were late to the "this is not the flu" party by a month and grossly incompetent leadership combined with the CDC literally lying to its people === the perfect storm. Further, those numbers are based on NYC hospitals being completely overwhelmed which sky rocketed the death rate. If a country can flatten their curve what is happening in New York doesn't have to happen again.
    - acdha 6y ago
      “Fox and OAN” are not the same as “news stations”. If you got your news anywhere else this was reported accurately by the middle of January[1] and there were plenty of experts calling for social distancing by February. The decision to politicize medicine will go down in history’s list of bad calls but it’s a function of the right-wing propaganda network, not the news media or public health experts. 1. Yes, there was that dweeb with the NYT opinion piece saying it wasn’t worse than the flu. There’s a reason that ran in the opinion section.
epistasis 6y ago
If you are concerned about this, the app is the least of your worries because BLE and MAC addresses are already being used to track your movements, for commercial purposes. For example inside stores. Additionally, many many apps silently gather and sell this data, without your knowledge, and with "consent" being ignored or being relegated to privacy statements that are too vague to understand that they are doing this. I really hope that if people are concerned at all in any way about the tracking app mentioned here that they also learn that such tracking is being used extensively in industry right now. I'm surprised how few people on HN seem to know this. If any audience should know and warn our friends and neighbors, it's the audience at HN.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  So we get the reverse of the reasonable behavior. People - and I mean tech people, not Joes and Janes Random - freak out over using movement tracking to fight a pandemic, while they willingly accept the same tech being used by advertisers. It's like people want to suffer.
jstanley 6y ago
Conversely, you could argue that your "right to health" isn't worth putting other people's privacy at considerable risk for.
- jfoster 6y ago
  You have no privacy to protect if you are not alive.
leetcrew 6y ago
by all means, you are free to make this tradeoff for yourself. but you don't get to decide what other people's privacy should be worth to them. > There isn't even a scenario I could imagine where one of these apps would do something that I would consider a severe infringement of my privacy. do you live in the united states? there have been quite a few privacy fiascos in the last couple decades that the general public found unimaginable until they were exposed.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Going a step beyond the info in the blog post, there's a documentary on Youtube showing how in S. Korea, there are apps to see the paths of corona patients so you can avoid those areas: Covid-19 in S. Korea @5:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c My opinion is those apps work because S. Korea remembers SARS-1 (2002/2003), and people there are cooperative. Also, if you do full contact tracing early enough, there aren't an overwhelming number of patients like NY. S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above. (S. Korea had the same problem as Toronto with SARS-1, where the hospital doctors and nurses were wiped out by the first few cases. In S. Korea, it was the first SARS-1 patient wandering around town like a cruise missile to several doctors and hospitals that spread the disease, as nobody identified the magnitude of the problem.) > And how will things work with an orderly supermarket queue, where law-abiding people stand patiently six feet apart? In the SF Bay Area, here's how social distancing works at grocery stores: 1) one entrance/exit with security guards at the door 2) queue outside with shoppers 6' apart 3) only 50 people allowed in at one time, but distance is not enforced in the store except 6' in checkout lanes. However, American grocery stores are large, so the spirit is being followed. Recently, I've seen saran wrap over POS terminals. Bank ATMs also need that prophylactic. :) 4) shoppers are responsible for washing their carts and hands, which is a gap.

dfsegoat 6y ago
S. Korea, as I understand it, also assigned a trained case worker to every single case or suspected COVID case. This enabled the contact tracing to be quite successful, and something I believe we’ll need to emulate in the US to prevent the next outbreak in the fall.
sfj 6y ago
> S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above. Taiwan has also done so. It has a similar story, burned by SARS, also. https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En
- maxerickson 6y ago

pintxo 6y ago

Some interesting thoughts: > First, it isn’t anonymous ... I believe this is a miss understanding. We loose anonymity once someone is diagnosed, there is no way around that. But we should not skip on anonymity for everyone else. Else this whole project is doomed by the onset as we are simply building a massive 1984 style infrastructure. > Second, contact tracers have access to all sorts of other data such as public transport ticketing and credit-card records ... Which is debatable, but not a major problem as long as this is a largely manual ad-hoc process regulated by law and so expensive to execute that we only do it during emergency situations. It's totally different once we start building systems and processes around this to make it cheap and it ends as the new normal. > Third, you can’t wait for diagnoses. ... Surely a problem we need to improve upon. Likely a major logistics problem? Maybe something we should ask the military to take a look, after all logistics is something they might have an idea how to do right. > Fourth, the public health authorities need geographical data for purposes other than contact tracing ... Why would this need to be part of contract tracing? Currently this is done based on confirmed cases. Surely they are largely localized, especially since the stay-home orders. > Fifth, although the cryptographers – and now Google and Apple – are discussing more anonymous variants of the Singapore app, that’s not the problem. ... I agree, trolling, denial of service and school kids are going to be a problem. Could likely be solved by adding a formal gate for infected. Signing the test result with a public-private key scheme should do the trick to prevent any non-legitimate results being used to trigger events. > Sixth, there’s the human aspect. Interestingly I would have said this is the technology aspect. How many contacts will we miss because bluetooth low energy is not up to the job? > Seventh, on the systems front, decentralised systems are all very nice in theory but are a complete pain in practice as they’re too hard to update. ... Relying on cryptography tends to make things even more complex, fragile and hard to change. Seems solvable, considering we are talking about mobile apps, mostly always online, managed through central app stores and servers? Sounds doable. > But the real killer is likely to be the interaction between privacy and economics. If the app’s voluntary, nobody has an incentive to use it, except tinkerers and people who religiously comply with whatever the government asks. Tend to agree, although we have seen quite some adherence to sensible rules the last couple of weeks. Maybe we will be surprised by our fellow humans, maybe not.

antpls 6y ago

kiwidrew 6y ago

I applaud the efforts to investigate whether smartphone technology can be a useful aid in the contact tracing process. Privacy aside, it seems to me that there are two main issues that Bluetooth-beaconing-smartphones will struggle to solve: 1. Determining whether two smartphones "hearing" each other's beacon constitutes contact between the owners of those smartphones. (The blog post we're discussing brings up several examples, and the "orderly supermarket queue" of shoppers patiently waiting outside while observing a 2m distance could generate a massive number of false positives.) 2. Ensuring widespread adoption. If only 1/6th of the population is participating (which are the numbers Singapore is seeing so far) then the chance that an encounter between two people is captured by the app is 1/36th -- far too low to be of much use. There is also an upper limit to adoption because not everyone owns a smartphone or has a device which would be compatible with the contact tracing app.

mytailorisrich 6y ago
I wouldn't call being within 2m of a contaminated person a "false positive". I don't think these distances are absolutely safe and it's impossible to say exactly what interactions occured. The data from Bluetooth beacons are probably as good as is possible to get.
- kiwidrew 6y ago
  In an open space (such as a supermarket carpark) the Bluetooth LE range could easily be 10-20 meters. So one person standing in the queue could potentially be considered a contact of the 5+ people in front of them plus the 5+ people behind them. If you're not prepared to test all of those people (and potentially multiple times) then what action should the potential contacts take? Should they all isolate themselves for 14 days because they were in the same carpark as a confirmed case for a few minutes?
  - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
    presumably that is a pretty accurate sample of people likely to be infected by me. All the shoppers in the supermarket while I am (and shortly afterwards) are at risk of picking up the satsumas I fondled too much etc. (to be clear, I'm operating a 'touch means take' policy, but its clear through simple observation that most aren't capable of thinking through the rule (or even following it))

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tcd 6y ago

Not trying to be cynical, but to me this seems to be a way to get the mass public "okay" with contact tracing. Then somehow they "mysteriously" manage to get more accurate information from other sources (location, wifi beacons, data sharing etc). But they'll just say "the information is only from this source, we pinky promise!".

buboard 6y ago

I think the author is correct that people are missing the forest here. I know plenty of people that would have no problem with public tracing of patients (myself included), but it wouldn't be effective in stopping the virus here. And not because the app's uptake would be small - people are dying to do something , anything, so they 'd download it. Maybe singaporeans did not download it because they feel already protected enough by their health system, but westerners feel so unprotected by them that they buy TP by the metric ton. S.Korea and singapore/hong kong, those are densely populated areas/cities with specific movement patterns among people and enough tehcnology infrastructure to know what do something useful with the tracing information. In some western cities, tracing would end up giving people constant alarms that they might be infected, and that information wouldn't really be actionable or at least you coulnd't trust that people would act on it. Western cities have no memory of other plagues either. Perhaps goverments should reward distancing and testing instead of punishing offenders. Perhaps even pubs could open, provided they serve the same group of 10 people every monday. Western cities will need to figure out their own policies until a cure is found, and they have to reflect their own character - you can't just copy asian policies praying that they work.

rubidium 6y ago

Here’s the real deal. I’m quite privacy conscious. Hate tracking of any type, esp. for some mega corps profit. That said, I’d gladly install a decent security verified app that tracks me for the next 3 months. I’d be happy to self isolate again with my family (as we’re doing now) if I came in contact with someone. But the big issues are: - ensure tracking is available only to those who need it and doesn’t get shared with any commercial interest. - my employer supports WFH or short term paid sick leave (maybe with gov’t assistance) for those 14 days. Get those two things and I think the majority of the US population would opt in. That would be sufficient. Sure there’s some risk that people are infected who won’t opt in. But that opt in system of “we’re all in this together” is much better than a forced gov’t tracking system.

slothtrop 6y ago

I'm disappointed that some I've come across are trying to cast SK's measures as tyrannical, as though it's not authoritarian to shut down the economy and force everyone to stay home. Cooperating with contact tracing is a lesser temporary loss of freedom than not working. It's not even clear to me to what extent it helped, all the articles I've read repeatedly state that early testing in itself has been the deciding factor. In theory then, if the infection rate were temporarily quashed, couldn't this be implemented? And both sides of the political spectrum are behaving this way, the right-wing downplays the risk and postures that a lockdown will lead to a worse outcome, and many dems pretend a lockdown is the only thing that could have realistically been done, looking to SK like "oh, well they're draconian, that could never happen".

hcurtiss 6y ago

When did “flatten the curve” become “eliminate transmission”? We have abundant hospital capacity remaining nearly everywhere up in the US. It seems likely we can begin moving toward herd immunity significantly more quickly by relaxing social distancing standards and quarantining sensitive populations, all while remaining below the horizontal line. It’s not worth surrendering civil liberties, something we’ve sacrificed many lives to preserve.

chrisco255 6y ago
Agreed. Also, due to the indiscriminate cancellation of "elective" surgeries (which include things like bone marrow transplants), my mother's hospital is slower than normal! They're facing a funding crunch as a result and may need to cut staff. This is the insanity of centralized policy making when the distribution of impact is not even in all districts.
maxerickson 6y ago
Define "sensitive populations". Also, define how you (effectively!) quarantine sensitive populations with less impact on civil liberties than testing and contact tracing of the general population (which has modest privacy implications that can be reasonably managed).
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Sweden isn’t doing a half bad job of it (1). Sure they have more cases than Norway but they certainly don’t have exponential growth. (1) https://www.aier.org/article/what-sweden-has-done-right-on-coronavirus/ https://www.aier.org/article/what-sweden-has-done-right-on-c...
- leetcrew 6y ago
  by definition, sensitive populations face the greatest personal risk from violating the quarantine. most of them would probably comply if the government merely asked them. it's hard to see how contact tracing of the general population can be done with "modest" privacy implications, unless it's opt-in.

dchyrdvh 6y ago

Apple, Google, Facebook already track everyone and everything they can: all these gps, wifi, Bluetooth and even ultrasound trackers built into smartphones exist only for one purpose. After all, they are in the business of building accurate user profiles and selling ads to them. What they do need is ability to do this openly, so they're trying to leverage the epidemics to legalize their business (ATM it's in the grey area: kinda legal, but amoral).