I find these articles incredibly frustrating. If you go in with such a bias against the core concept then you run at risk of throwing out common sense in the pr

I find these articles incredibly frustrating. If you go in with such a bias against the core concept then you run at risk of throwing out common sense in the process. The article can basically be summarized in two points: slippery slope and distrusting the platform holder. The former is best countered by looking over what the platform holders do, the latter has little to do with contact tracing. Apple already broadcasts proximity IDs for "find my". They were in fact heralded for their privacy first approach of that protocol until a few months ago. If you distrust your platform holder — which is fine — then be aware of what they are doing everywhere. This contact tracing protocol is by far the least worrisome thing these platforms do. In fact it largely just undoes a recent security improvement: MAC address rotation on Bluetooth. I have a bit problem with blog posts like this: they get circulated widely because they propagate the idea of the big platform holders building a surveillance system. It particularly problematic because it also plays into the hands of PEPP-PT and other efforts which actually do want to build a centralized contact tracing system and they need the platform holders to give more control over the bluetooth stack for that goal. Right now if apple and google were to go ahead with this implementation it would make it significantly harder to build a surveillance system than if certain other efforts would get their way.