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Germany flips to Apple-Google approach on smartphone contact tracing
- Traster 7y ago>When Apple refused to budge there was no alternative but to change course, said a senior government source. Shutting down every Apple office in the EU seems like a pretty good idea, oh and confiscating all Apple products, designs and patents..... Look, let's be positive and assume that the reason Germany backed down is because actually Apple's approach is better and they were convined by the explanations of why a centralised approach is wrong. Becuase the other explanation - that European countries are scared of Apple doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
- gsnedders 7y agoI think you're vastly overestimating Apple's influence here. While certainly losing out on the quarter of the smartphone market that Apple holds, having no app on iOS is likely a smaller issue than how to incentivise people to install the app in the first place.
- mstolpm 7y agoThere was a big backlash in the last days in Germany over the intended central server solution favored before. More than 300 experts and groups warned about privacy implications. It seems mentioning Apple in this regard is more used to not completely lose the face for the German government and the Helmholtz Institute that favored and developed the centralized version over the decentralized one. Please don't fall victim and paint Apple & Google as the bad boys here. It would be a horrible idea to force them by governments to implement a centralized protocol.
- Avamander 7y agoNah, a good protocol with strong privacy is needed before any implementations are allowed. This must be one of the few times I'm glad Apple is so restrictive, the current COVID-19 trackers have been horrendous: https://twitter.com/xssfox/status/1251118830962663424 https://twitter.com/xssfox/status/1251118830962663424
- InTheArena 7y agoGermany’s historical experience with centralized databases (using IBM tech) means that there are very good reasons to be skeptical of a centralized approach that could conceivably allow a government to spy on or classify the population of a whole country or even A continent. Silicon Valley is a useful boogeyman, in part because they have done some things on the negative side of the evil ledger. Historically governments dwarf private companies in the amount of damage and misuse they Can unleash — with a few notable exceptions where they almost reach the scale of what tyrannical or incompetent governments can wrought.
- loeg 7y agoFor folks missing the historical reference, IBM provided machines and support to the Nazis to "census" Jews.
- svat 7y agoSummary: Germany is moving away from a centralized approach (PEPP-PT = Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) to a decentralized one (like DP-3T = Decentralised Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing). A nice comic version of DP-3T, by Nicky Case, is available here: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ (But is the Apple-Google protocol identical to DP-3T, or does the headline mention “Apple-Google approach” just for simplicity? I heard there are some minor differences…)
- cm2187 7y agoI found that Steve Gibson’s description was both more technical and still very simple to follow, for those interested: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3DZ3St3QRw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3DZ3St3QRw Starts at about 1:19.
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoBetter link: https://youtu.be/Z3DZ3St3QRw?t=4748 https://youtu.be/Z3DZ3St3QRw?t=4748 Edit Gibson is a good explainer, but it's just a video of the two podcasters. It could be much clearer with visual aids.
- 0xBeefFed 7y agoThere are some differences. DP-3T proposes two different systems, one with linkable tokens and the other without linkable tokens. The first system is similar to Apple-Google in the sense that your tokens for a day are derived from a key which is uploaded to a central distribution server when you test positive. In the second system the tokens are not linkable and they propose the use of a Cuckoo Filter to reduce the space complexity. A Cuckoo Filter is a probabilistic data structure that can tell you if an item is not or might be in a set. As a result there are some false positives. DP-3T also explains how records are uploaded to a central server and the interactions with health-care providers. Apple-Google omit this part and focus on proximity data collection. Edit: Formatting + I wrote a survey paper on a few of the distributed protocols and how they defend against linkage attacks (de-anonymization): https://github.com/robertTheHub/ContactTracingSurvey/blob/master/ContactTracing.pdf https://github.com/robertTheHub/ContactTracingSurvey/blob/ma...
- sneak 7y ago> Germany as recently as Friday backed a centralised standard called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), which would have needed Apple in particular to change the settings on its iPhones. The phones in question are not Apple’s phones. Those phones, and their settings, belong to the end user. They paid for them.
- Reelin 7y agoExcept that the users themselves aren't permitted by Apple in all their benevolence to grant an app the necessary permissions on a device which they supposedly own! Of course users willingly made the choice to purchase such a device in the first place, though I'm not at all convinced that most understood the tradeoffs they were making. To say that my feelings about the current situation are conflicted would be an understatement.
- mrfusion 7y agoIf one fifth of New Yorkers have this isn’t the cat out of the bag? What do we accomplish with contact tracing?
- simonw 7y agoI think it's the case that if you can get everyone in NY to completely isolate for a couple of months then the number of New Yorkers who are carriers can decline to a point where contact tracing makes sense.
- cm2187 7y agoI am still not sold for NY. If you commute daily with the metro and test positive, even going back only one week, you are going to trigger hundreds of previous contacts (people in the same car in the train, on the platform, people you crossed walking in a tunnel, etc). Basically the average new yorker may end up having to get tested several times a week. I think it makes more sense when the density of contacts is less extreme.
- rhino369 7y agoBut you can't get everyone in NYC to completely isolate for a couple months. Millions of people in NY are still going to work every day just to keep the lights on and the food stores stocked.
- ISL 7y agoIncreasing the odds that my very-productive 82-year-old colleague can keep thriving for another twenty years? If there is no vaccine, or if the vaccine isn't very good, social-distancing and contact-tracing is the only way to win. One fifth of the global population doesn't yet have it. Like many people around the world are undoubtedly experiencing, an elderly relative died yesterday from Covid-19 in New York. I doubt she will be the last.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago>If there is no vaccine, or if the vaccine isn't very good, social-distancing and contact-tracing is the only way to win. Why is herd immunity not a "way we win"? edit: Ah, yes, concern about the time to get there. Well, let's hope that happens quicker than expected (has any study not shown this?) because from where I'm sitting it looks like lock down is ending.
- hilbert42 7y agoThat governments are taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to effectively 'mandate' tracking is about as sinister as it gets. Governments are playing on people's fears to overcome privacy concerns that they would otherwise have in normal circumstances; moreover, they're making it appear both normal and reasonable to be tracked. I rarely take my phone with me when I'm out and about and this has been the norm with me for years. I wonder how long it will be before I'm stopped in the street by police who'll ask me to present my phone for compliance inspection and when I report that I don't have it with me then I'll be fined. To avoid tracking, some people I know take a different approach which is to turn Airplane Mode on until they actually want to make a call. I wonder how long it will be before Airplane Mode in phones is disabled by mandate. I can foresee a time in the not-too-distant future when someone who doesn't want to own or use a phone will actually be mandated to do so by law. When that time arrives then we'll know that... ..."We've won victory over ourselves. We will have learned to love Big Brother."
- pmoriarty 7y ago"To avoid tracking, some people I know take a different approach which is to turn Airplane Mode on until they actually want to make a call. I wonder how long it will be before Airplane Mode in phones is disabled by mandate." Carry your phone in a container made out of conductive material and while the phone is in it you won't be tracked by it. Of course, all bets are off when you take it out. Even simpler solution: turn off your phone and maybe take out your phone's battery (if you're lucky enough to have a phone with a removable battery) when not using it.
- gruez 7y ago>Carry your phone in a container made out of conductive material and while the phone is in it you won't be tracked by it. If your threat model is a tyrannical government, what's preventing them from making it an offense to not carry a phone or otherwise interfere with the contact tracing system?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
- simonw 7y agoAustralia next? They're still telling people that in order use the Australian contact tracing app on iOS they'll have to leave it open and the screen unlocked! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-26/coronavirus-tracing-app-covidsafe-apple-iphone-covid-19/12187448 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-26/coronavirus-tracing-a...
- dang 7y agoAustralia thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22986147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22986147
- sfa_aok 7y agoI'm seeing really mixed messages on this. I saw a tweet yesterday about having to leave the screen on, but it turns out the source website was updated to remove that line, and that's not how the app works. However, there are also screenshots on Twitter of lock screen notifications saying that the app needs to be open so I don't know any more...
- rstuart4133 7y agoAustralia is already rolling it out. Maybe they would have used it if it was ready, but as it is this is effort from Apple/Google is too slow. Every week we let this virus live is costing the government (and eventually us) billions. Perhaps they will move to the Apple solution when it comes out as what they have for Apple is cumbersome. But they already have Android users. I rather like the solution the Apple/Google have come up with because it solves a more general problem very nicely. The more general problem is "malware" for what of a better word (it's perhaps too harsh) - apps that lie or mislead about what they do and hide what their bluetooth proximity harvesting in the permission thicket (who here would automatically associate the "Fine Location" permission with bluetooth proximity harvesting). But notice in this particular instance that's not what's happening. There is no attempt to deceive. The app is purely opt-in, and what you are opting into is very explicit. In this particular case there is almost no difference between what Apple/Google propose and TraceTogether. The difference amounts to when you give the government permission to know who you are. For TraceTogether it happens when you install the app. For the Apple/Google proposal, it's when you see your doctor when being notified you are infected. In both cases, no privacy is given up until you are infected, and assuming you installed the app in good faith and do get tested when notified the outcome is the same. There is the minor problem the Australian government could surreptitiously change the app to something more sinister down the track. I'd be very confident they would not do it now, but 24 months later when attitudes reverted it's sadly entirely plausible. That could be fixed by changing release policies (such as publish source before deploying). But it looks like for whatever reason they won't be doing that, so perhaps Apple/Google forcing them deal with the citizens they govern honestly and transparently is a good thing, despite the delays it causes.
- colinjoy 7y agoOnce more a reminder that we are lucky to have the CCC in Germany. I attribute this in no small part to their continuous lobbying and sisyphean efforts on the fringes of technology and civil rights. Thanks! https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2020/contact-tracing-requirements https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2020/contact-tracing-requireme...
- peteretep 7y agoIt seems that a simpler attribution chain, and one mentioned in the article, is simply that Apple said no.
- derda 7y agoThing is in the previous discussion it was already mentioned by experts that this "No" would be likely and that the result would be an App that would not be tightly integrated with the OS and thus less useful (and less used). But its now really easy for the politicians to point the finger at Apple instead of admitting ones fault. How large the influence of the CCC actually has been is of course uncertain but their comments have played a big part in public discussion of the last days. Most articles that I have read mentioned the criticism. And in German media quoting the CCC is often synonymous with "the nerds who actually understand computer say" (in good but also bad ways).
- exhilaration 7y agoCan you explain what Apple said no to? The article doesn't spell it out.
- peteretep 7y agoApple said no to allowing apps to do Bluetooth handshakes when they’re not open, as I understand it.
- koolba 7y agoHow does one enable this on an iPhone or Android phone? Directly related, how does one ensure this never gets turned on? Disable Bluetooth?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoNothing short of a Faraday cage is going to work if your threat model is that Apple turns it on against your will. (I guess in principle you could find and physically destroy the Bluetooth receiver.)
- darkerside 7y agoMaybe some kind of device that corrupts Bluetooth signal frequencies
- loeg 7y agoSignal jamming is illegal and will get you a conversation with the FCC, and more importantly, you're just being a dick to everyone else on the 2.4GHz band.
- darkerside 7y agoI don't disagree and wouldn't do this myself
- bhaak 7y agoThere are several options for a Faraday cage for you phone. For example this https://silent-pocket.com/ https://silent-pocket.com/
- sjwright 7y agoIf that’s your threat model, stop carrying a smartphone.
- rgovostes 7y agohttps://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact-tracing/pdf/ExposureNotification-FAQv1.0.pdf https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu... Section 4, "How will the system protect user privacy and security?", bullet one: > Each user will have to make an explicit choice to turn on the technology. It can also be turned off by the user at any time. > Can I turn it off? Yes. The choice to use this technology rests with the user, and he or she can turn it off at any time by uninstalling the contact tracing application or turning off exposure notification in Settings.
- darkerside 7y agoKudos to Apple for not budging on this. A senior dev once shared a bit of wisdom with me. That developers don't typically hold all the power, but the point of leverage we do have is that in the end we are the ones who actually are going to build it. Disagree with PM on a feature? If you feel strongly enough, you build it your way until they remove you from the project. YMMV. Skate at your own risk. Anyway, that's essentially what Apple seems to have done here. Strong move, and one they should be rewarded for.
- bobsil1 7y agoThat works until the technical PM has checkin permissions
- dvtrn 7y agoCheck in what? If dev refuses to write it PM has nothing to check in.
- wcoenen 7y agoCheckin = commit changes into version control system
- darkerside 7y agoUnless the PM is going to write the entire feature themselves, check-in perms aren't going to do much.
- woutr_be 7y ago> Disagree with PM on a feature? If you feel strongly enough, you build it your way until they remove you from the project. This really only works in certain companies tho. I’ve seen some of our best developers removed from our project because they refused to build features that didn’t make sense. Word just goes up to senior management, and all of the sudden you’re to blame for project delays, and eventually pushed to another project.
- yalogin 7y agoWhy are governments trying to come up with their own? Why can’t they legislate around the protocol instead? Standardizing on the protocol saves a lot of time In the current situation.
- peteretep 7y ago> Why are governments trying to come up with their own? Governments contain no shortage of people interested in personal glory
- rgovostes 7y agoGoogle and Apple have published a FAQ about how this system, which they're now calling Exposure Notification, will work from a high level. (This is not the protocol details, which are published elsewhere.) Important bit: This will not default to on, you will have to opt in. Apple and Google have a regional kill switch if it is being abused. https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact-tracing/pdf/ExposureNotification-FAQv1.0.pdf https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
- dirtyid 7y agoA few thoughts: 1. There's a fixation on contact tracing without recognition that it's useless without isolation. In-home isolation will infect other occupants. Voluntary isolation doesn't scale. Asian countries doing effective test+trace+isolation already know this. Think of it terms of kill chain F2T2EA: find, fix, track, target, engage, assess. You have to execute the entire loop for effect. The ability to force people quarantine is probably a greater obstacle to liberty depending on local context that needs more discussion. 2. This is going to be EU's Huawei moment. Reliance on US tech for internal policy security that is subject to US political whims is going to cause further exacerbate calls of technological divestment. Who decides when covid19 crisis is over? What if EU want to keep contact tracing in place long term if it's the only ubiquitous system in place for reinstating schengen. I surmise some sort or global digital cordon sanitarie is going to be with us for a while, especially if we want to resume international travel.
- Eridrus 7y agoAny bit of reduced transmission helps. All we need is for R0<<1 and then this pandemic will end. Any contacts this finds that human contact tracers do not is a win.
- james_s_tayler 7y agoR_t < 1
- dirtyid 7y agoUnless Asian countries are erring on the extreme side of caution it seems wise to assume test+tracing is not sufficient for R0<1. Their effective responses all employ techno-authoritarian interventions: wrist bracelets, GPS tracking, publicly releasing travel routes, QR health codes, out of home quarantine etc. This includes democratic countries. There's an ongoing myopia in the west that is failing to fully interrogate the solutions from Asian countries who are doing well in it's full scope and ramifications on liberty and applicability based on appetite for sacrificing liberty. Media is happy to elevate testing and contact tracing, without acknowledging the authoritarian followup. E: I'm just suggesting it's worth discussing the system in aggregate rather than piecemeal.
- exit 7y agoare codes broadcast without any uniquely identifying "bluetooth address", or something to that effect?
- unnouinceput 7y agomy understanding is that the "codes" are randomly generated stuff, none based on any of the phone parameters. In which case you don't need any address. However, I am curious about collision. Same stuff happened 25+ years ago with famous Pentium bug. Intel was something like "this bug will happen only one time in 10 thousand years", except they considered those 10 thousand years happening under lab conditions, while in the production it hit so hard due to all software that used intensively, like AutoCad, that it actually happened per hour - result was disastrous for calculations for entire teams that were creating Architecture or Naval shipping research that in the end Intel issued a full recall on the entire chip line.
- Reelin 7y agoThese are 128-bit cryptographically secure numbers that rely on thoroughly battle tested primitives. There is absolutely no way a compliant implementation would generate a noticeable number of collisions unless the underlying keys themselves were the same. (And I would certainly expect that Apple and Google are capable of generating the underlying keys in a cryptographically secure manner.)
- unnouinceput 7y ago"These are 128-bit cryptographically secure numbers that rely on thoroughly battle tested primitives". Oh, wow! So that's like 128 / 8 => 16 bytes? As in 16 ASCII characters? And what crypto has to do with them anyway in this context? Do explain please, I'd love to hear that. And also tell me about those primitives as well, I really need to hear their names. If dang didn't warned me already not to feed the trolls in the past I'd say that you're full of "you know what", but since he did I'll just stop here
- Reelin 7y ago
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y agoDo any of the custom-built apps work reasonably well? I know that the last time I touched Bluetooth on phones (long ago) the stacks were so buggy that getting different devices to communicate reliably was next to impossible. It would work for some devices, but cause issues with others etc. I would expect that any custom solution would be implemented by one of the few contractors experienced in dealing with the local bureaucracy, and would thus suffer from a lack of experience in dealing with Bluetooth and all the undocumented quirks. I wonder if that played into the decision.
- farnsworth 7y agoSomething I don't understand about this approach - if location data is not tracked/included, only contacts, then don't you have to download all the tokens for every person who tests positive in the world? Then even if it is optimized with location data, and I can only download tokens for people in my area, that will be 1000s of people a day multiplied by all of their tokens over whatever period of time. Either I'm misunderstanding something or it has just been decided that downloading many MBs a day is not a dealbreaker.
- zzzeek 7y agoI think your phone collects tokens from other phones that you come near. So your phone only needs to take the few hundred / thousand tokens it has and ping the server with them to see if any of them have advertised that they are a positive result.
- peteretep 7y agoAh, my understanding is that it doesn’t do this; that is, you don’t upload tokens you’ve seen, otherwise there would be a privacy issue.
- pmontra 7y agoI understand that people with a data cap of a few GB and no Wi-Fi could end up being unable to download the tokens before the end of the month. For example a friend of mine stopped showing up in video calls with a group of friends because she's saving her GBs for the video calls she has to do for work. She should be spending a few Euros more per month but it's easy to wish with the money of other people.
- tastroder 7y agoDP3T is exploring various options for this, smallest daily proposal currently being 5MB, bigger picture download around 100MB. Worst case mobile providers could always be compelled to exempt this from data usage. That aspect seems pretty solved.
- 7y ago
- Aeolun 7y agoWow, I’m a bit surprised that the one with the ability to say yes or no in this instance was Apple. I’m not sure if I enjoy the idea that any given company can overrule the government of the country it operates in...
- Reelin 7y agoAgreed. I certainly appreciate Apple's stance on privacy lately, but it doesn't seem reasonable for a corporation (particularly one based in a different country!) to be willing or capable of forcing the government's hand.
- teruakohatu 7y agoTurn it around, does it seem reasonable that an overseas government should be able to force a US company to make changes to their OS and add functionality it was never designed to have? If Germany really needed it, they could take Apple to court. I am sure Siemens would be horrified it it was turned around and the US govt started demanding they modify their industrial controllers, famously targeted by stuxnet, to allow them to be tracked more easily.
- Reelin 7y ago> does it seem reasonable that an overseas government should be able to force a US company to make changes to their OS and add functionality it was never designed to have Yes, it actually does. I certainly don't like the idea of such an action being taken in practice, but isn't dictating that certain arbitrary requirements must be met in order to do business within a jurisdiction kind of a large part of the point of having a government in the first place? What's concerning to me about this case is that end users aren't even capable of opting in at present and that due to the time constraints involved Apple would appear to have a distinct advantage. Note that the previous (somewhat similar) controversy in the US involving Apple was an issue specifically due to questions about constitutionally protected rights and federal government overreach.
- bpodgursky 7y ago
- unishark 7y ago> Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) Another problem with this standard is its overuse of plosives, which are themselves dangerous when disease is spread by droplets.
- walterbell 7y agoAn innovation in Sanitation Bioterror Theatre! Let's drop some letters from all alphabets, they can keep company with missed hugs and statistical literacy.
- andybak 7y agoMy god. You're on to something. We don't have to ban gatherings, merely gatherings with particular consonants. I'm off to arrange my birthday arty.
- iso1631 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ISJS4gSBh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ISJS4gSBh0
- antpls 7y agoEven decentralized, there always will be a central authority in the system that you will have to trust to not misbehave in the future. The other issue is that contact tracing (decentralized or not) is exploitable. In Korea, people sometime figured out who is infected or not, and those people are now socially bashed on the internet. There are many scenarios where contact tracing can be abused : for example, anyone from outside your house can now know if there is someone inside. Handy for thieves. French academics did set up a nice website with a list of those scenarios, but it's only available in French : https://risques-tracage.fr/ https://risques-tracage.fr/ The actual debate is not decentralized/centralized, it's "should we allow contact tracing or ban it?"
- tastroder 7y ago> The actual debate is not decentralized/centralized, it's "should we allow contact tracing or ban it?" Did you mean "digital contact tracing" there? Contact tracing itself is a necessary tool when dealing with a pandemic and I really do not see anybody arguing against that. Of course there's a lot of trade-offs and questions like voluntary/mandatory, usage restrictions, etc. but I feel like decentralized vs. centralized debate was a good first discussion to have in a democracy.
- antpls 7y ago> Contact tracing itself is a necessary tool when dealing with a pandemic and I really do not see anybody arguing against that. Humanity got right we are today (still alive and growing) without digital contact tracing. So, no, this is not a "necessary" tool. I wish the link I posted above was available in English too, because they analyzed a few scenario that shows how digital contact tracing can be exploited by anyone, not just techies people. I would rather be a partisan of investing our money in technologies that heal and strengthen our bodies. At least regenerating and healing the body could help with many other diseases.
- tilolebo 7y agoGP literally explained that "contact tracing" and "digital contact tracing" are two different things... He said "contact tracing" is necessary.
- jgraham 7y agoIs there a good discussion anywhere of the anticipated impact in effacity on various choices around privacy here? A simple toy model for the fraction of infection chains stopped might be something like fraction stoppped = (usage fraction in population)2 * (fraction of infections recorded as contacts) * (fraction of detected contacts who follow up correctly) That's obviously a massive over simplification; for example real population dynamics don't give full random mixing between all members of the population. But every factor there is potentially depressed because of opt in and anomnymity; the first obviously so, the third because people are less likely to followup correctly if there's no consequence for not doing so, and the second because it will be impossible to tune the detection parameters without any data to work from. In that — again oversimplified — model if you get 50% o the population using the app (compared to 80% smartphone usage in western Europe), it detects 80% of transmissions and (say) 50% of people follow up correctly before themselves passing the disease on, you end up with 10% of infection chains traced. That doesn't seem like it's going to have a big impact. So assuming that model's not wildly wrong — which it could be, again, I'm really looking for a link to an expert discussion of this, I can see a few possibilities: * Digitial contract tracing doesn't have much impact on our ability to control the virus * Governments seek to outsource the privacy-invasion needed to companies by e.g. requiring evidence that people are using the contact tracing software and have followed up on potential transmission events before allowing people to buy food etc. * Ineffective opt-in contact tracing and a second wave of pandemic deaths/lockdown is used to bounce people into accepting the need for mandatory, non-anonymous contact tracing with fewer privacy concessions than you'd get right now. To be clear I'm very concerned with the idea of govenments and in particular the current UK government having access to non-anonymised contact data; it's already being run by someone who considers population-level manipulation using data science and social media to be his core skillset. But I'd also like to understand what tradeoffs are being made in terms of disease control.
- tastroder 7y agoWhile of course a valid question I feel like some of your assumptions might have a different impact in reality. For Germany "50% of people follow up correctly" for example seems unrealistic due to a few factors: - The proposed centralized solution would have to rely on malice to easily identify people that did not follow up correctly since there was no means to do that in it. The only upside you would have had was more trivial means for data collection on population scale to validate random epidemiological models and validate follow up. - 50% of people failing to follow up correctly seems like an unreasonably low number given that it's not that different from breaking quarantine with the existing process and there's few enough cases of that to still garner high profile media attention here. - Even if 50% wrong behaviour was a correct assumption, that would be a slippery slope in most models. If you lose, say, 10% of the overall population because it's allergic to the historical and privacy implications of the system design, misbehaviour of 50% of people left using it can be pretty irrelevant. - AFAIR adoption in Singapore, which is often used as a reason to use this model in the first place, so far has not been anywhere close to the 50% of 80% of phone users. Many people seem to suggest looking at WhatsApps growth rates for realistic adoption time frames. Fraser et al have a few general articles and calculated through scenarios on the matter that might be interesting, maybe you get something out of those: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie... https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/files/files/report-effective-app-configurations.pdf https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/files/files/report-effective-app... Many discussions w.r.t. the epidemiological impact of these trade-offs at the moment seem anecdotal because they lack proper validation. I do not think any of them so far directly address the one you are looking at here.
- supernova87a 7y agoAs someone newly reading about this proposal, I'm curious to know which element of privacy is most of concern to people -- to educate myself on what tradeoffs some policymaker might understand and make some judgement call about. (wishful thinking) (Suppose someone in charge of virus response is totally naive and says the old phrase, "what does anyone have to be worried about losing privacy, in the face of this public health crisis?" Or, "why wouldn't we want to know exactly when and where the transmission happened, to identify some trouble spot and stop it?") Are we more concerned about one's location every 5 min being revealed? What if coffee shops/bus stations/shopping centers broadcast beacons and essentially became fixed known users -- doesn't that defeat this? And doesn't your phone already reveal location to anyone with sufficient access / authority on cell networks? Are we more concerned about revealing who you associate with? Again, isn't that already possible through cell locations? Are we not losing something by giving up recording the location element of the transmission event? What are some examples of how this technology (if implemented wrong) could be misused, that are not already available? And here's a related public policy question -- if we think ridiculous the people who are jumping to reopen businesses (and states) at the cost of putting people's lives at risk, why is privacy so important versus saving lives if a more effective (but slightly less private) information gathering mechanism could be implemented?
- LeanderK 7y agoMy impression as a german: Government access to private data: revealing location & contacts. I think privacy might be the wrong description, I think it's more about surveillance of the people by the state, which is not acceptable for a huge percentage of people I know. Privacy is most of the time the better wording, but I think surveillance is the better fitting term for this occasion. Just compare it to the DDR (German democratic republic, the communist state). Is it similar to the surveillance by DDRs Stasi, which tried to track every move and every word of dissidents? As an additional point: You can't force people to use the app (as far as i know). I don't think this is in any way compatible with basic human rights as formulated by the Grundgesetz (which I support, we are a democracy where the power comes from the people and not an authoritarian regime). They have to opt-in themselves. You have to make the app attractive so that people want to opt-in.
- LatteLazy 7y agoI'm sort of divided on this. It's a better safer approach. But all of our movements and who we spend time with are already being tracked and have been for decades so why the pretence? Why are we reinventing this wheel, just have the NSA open their files.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago> Centralised apps would not work properly on Apple’s iPhone because, for Bluetooth exchanges to happen, the device would need to be unlocked with the app running in the foreground - a drain on the battery and an inconvenience to the user. This is bullshit plain and simple. This is a political decision.
- hmd_imputer 7y agoit is kind of ironic that a country priding itself in data privacy was pushing for a very centralized data collection, while the "evil Apple" was pushing for a more decentralized and privacy-preserving approach.
- dingo_bat 7y agoMy smartphone is never going to have any of these apps installed. Pandemic is not an excuse to give up liberty and privacy.