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This is silly. There’s a clearly demonstrable reason why Germany switched tack, and why the UK should too. All of this contact tracing can be done in a privacy

This is silly. There’s a clearly demonstrable reason why Germany switched tack, and why the UK should too. All of this contact tracing can be done in a privacy preserving way. However, the NHSX development of these tools is led by such industry partners as palantir... We aren’t going to see much regard for privacy from them. Edit: Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. It should be optional for people, but it should be part of the OS, and it should just be presented to the countries as ready to go with just a little bit of integration. That way we can force everyone to respect user privacy and not do sketchy contact tracing apps.

anon102010 7y ago
I will never touch / install contact tracing if it can be backdoored into global surveilance. Apple has built a reputation for at least trying to preserve some user privacy. Their current proposal keeps it simple, your privacy is preserved and benefits for exposure notification (FAR beyond current horrendous govt efforts in terms of speed of notification etc) are there. They need to get their act together, and ignore folks trying to backdoor their systems.
- 0xBeefFed 7y ago
  It should be noted that your privacy is not preserved if you test positive and need to upload your Daily Tracing Keys to a server. Your broadcast IDs for an entire day can be linked together, making it easier to de-anonymize you. I understand that they use Daily Tracing Keys to reduce the demand of the backend server, but I think it would be better for user privacy if they either reduced the linkable period from a day to say an hour, or used an unlinkable design.
  - pintxo 7y ago
    In case you test positive, and we actually have the resources to trace your contacts, your privacy will be gone in todays system for sure. As you'll have to provide information about your recent contacts to the authorities performing the contact tracing. At least that's how I understand our local law (Germany). So I don't think its necessarily worse doing it with an App than doing it the old fashioned way. Sure digital traces are always easier to abuse, but then on the other hand, because things get automated, actually less people might get access to your data. Which would be a privacy win. I believe what's even more important than how we design the app, is how we design the legal framework around it. We do need rock solid laws, having enforceable data retention periods, and that limit access to the pare minimum needed. Unfortunately, our track record for the design of such laws has not been too good over the last years.
    - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
      The difference is that the old system relied on human memory which is fallible, not to mention you can omit details which would lead to further trouble (infidelities for one). In this system the only control a user has is to turn off bluetooth, or leave their phone at home if Apple/Google override the users ability to turn this off.
      - skybrian 7y ago
        I think it's up to you to upload the data? It seems like it depends how the app is designed. The protocol doesn't specify it.
        0xBeefFed 7y ago
        The protocol states that it will upload the Diagnosis Keys, a set of Daily Tracing Keys relevant to your exposure. So in short, if this is the case it forces the user to either upload all their keys or none. I would like to note that a v1.1 has recently been released, my information is about v1.0.
        Reelin 7y ago
        The specification (at least v1.1) contains nothing about uploading keys. The API appears to provide only the minimum required for protocol implementation. The ENSelfExposureInfoRequest class can be used by an app to obtain diagnosis keys for the previous 14 days. What an app does with those keys is up to whoever implements it. https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact-tracing/pdf/ExposureNotification-FrameworkDocumentationv1.1.pdf https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
        0xBeefFed 7y ago
        That does not seem to line up with their cryptography specification, which is where I am getting my information from. Thank you for mentioning this
  - xfitm3 7y ago
    If I keep my phone in a RF blocking bag and remove it only when needed I will have some semblance of privacy. I don't care about push notifications.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    Well, let's keep in mind it is decentralised, so only people who have been in contact with you can correlate it with your location at a given time in the past. Not the whole world nor a central authority. And even is someone goes to that extent to track your identity down, I am not sure that local de-anonymisation is a problem. This is not something like HIV. I don't think there is any social stigma to catching the coronavirus. If you catch it you should self-isolate, and it will be obvious to the people around you that you got it. And if you don't want to self-isolate and want to hide it, what is the point to self declare that you got contaminated on the app in the first place?
    - jstarfish 7y ago
      > I don't think there is any social stigma to catching the coronavirus. "In Mexico, Colombia, India, the Philippines, Australia and other countries, people terrified by the highly infectious virus are lashing out at medical professionals — kicking them off buses, evicting them from apartments, even dousing them with water mixed with chlorine." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-doctors-nurses-attack-mexico-ivory-coast/2020/04/08/545896a0-7835-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronaviru... ...and these are cases where the victims don't even have the virus. Disease has always carried stigma. We tend to lash out at things we don't understand. History has seen everything from leper colonies to menstruating women herded into tents. You or I may be able to rationalize it and say "well, shit, the test was positive-- time to self-isolate" but plenty of plebes will use it as cause to incite a witch hunt, especially if a loved one dies from it and transmission is attributable to you.
      - cm2187 7y ago
        OK, that's a fair point, but it would take someone uneducated that believes in the stigma to also be a tech wiz to collect and correlate the data. Presumably the app won't tell you when and where the contact happened (and if so, no implementation of contact tracing is anonymous since the app won't know that you were in a busy bus full of strangers or in a small office with a single colleague).
  - red0point 7y ago
    Valid point. DP3T (in one configuration) adresses this and lets you filter out certain parts that you do not wish to disclose. Thus, this then requires you to upload all broadcast identities used in the relevant timeframe, but because of space-related issues is then „compressed“ using a Cuckoo-Filter. This, however, yields false-positives. To eliminate those to a managable amount, it further requires more space. So, this has a tradeoff. Personally I don‘t think that linking multiple IDs in a day is a big intrusion of your privacy (and remember, it‘s only disclosed to anyone for the timeframe that is epidemologically relevant) - full de-anonymization still requires some second channel, such as cameras or the like - which can be linked together without those Broadcast IDs anyways.
    - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
      The unlinked DP-3T is one extreme, there is a happy medium if developers don't want to use Cuckoo Filters or Bloom Filters due to false positives, which is to decrease the linkable period. If the period was an hour, people could freely share legitimate tokens for their commute, but hide the ones where they had an hour long 1-1 with their manager.
    - radicalbyte 7y ago
      The thing with Bloom/Cuckoo filters is that you can play around with the parameters and, for example, provide a set of filters for a day in such a way that the app users can do a binary search. It never provides a false negative so all positives can download their set-up filters until they're satisfied. The filter that DP3T are describing isn't that much bigger than the DTK set anyway.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    It's hard to test positive given the extremely limited supply of tests and all the effort you'd have to go through to get tested. I really can't imagine anybody willingly testing -more so with new invasive tracking- unless they are really ill and in need of medical attention.
    - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
      The issue is, if your putting the risk on infected users, what is the benefit to them to release their tokens? They are already at risk, this just makes them bigger targets.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    This is almost never actually the case. Your daily keys are random, so the only way to know it's you is for someone to monitor bluetooth devices near by, and associate those keys with a physical identity... which becomes very difficult unless there's only one other person you come into contact with. In practice, it provides about the best anonymity you could ask for.
  - marblar 7y ago
    The recorded broadcast IDs can be linked together, but only if they are somehow gathered from all of the devices that have been near you. As far as I can tell, the spec doesn't include recorded broadcast IDs ever leaving the device.
jupp0r 7y ago
> Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. It should be optional for people, but it should be part of the OS, and it should just be presented to the countries as ready to go with just a little bit of integration. That way we can force everyone to respect user privacy and not do sketchy contact tracing apps. I think that's a terrible idea. Think about how somebody can mark themselves as being infected. Normally you'd want this to be authorized by a doctor or similar, or maybe just by reporting symptoms if the situation is dire. Google and Apple rightfully did not want to be involved with these decisions, they just want to provide a way to detect contacts via bluetooth while still mandating preservation of their users privacy.
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  Parent said a framework. Technically, the framework could be designed in such a way that they whitelist apps or agencies that can do that. Or you’d be given a code to authenticate the results and so on.
  - jupp0r 7y ago
    Sure, but look at how much governments resent the current limitations already. If they started mandating how doctors authenticate against the app and other processes that are wildly different between countries, they might end up with no countries using their framework.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    That's exactly what's happening.
9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
How can governments or individuals check if its implemented the way they claim? Phones are black boxes, read source code and hope it is what it reads?
- cm2187 7y ago
  Apparently you just need to trust GCHQ, who advised them. There isn't another agency privacy minded people would rather trust (apart perhaps its US and Chinese equivalents).
Despegar 7y ago
>Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible That's exactly what they're doing.
- Reason077 7y ago
  The timeframe for the Apple-Google solution is unclear. I’ve seen “later this year” mentioned rather than days, weeks, or months.
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    I originally heard May, now it's being suggested that it's this week or next.
  - djrogers 7y ago
    The official timeframe has been 'May' ever since the original announcement. First version of the API is now reported to be available on April 28th: https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/apple-contact-tracing-april-28/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/apple-contact-tracing-april-2...
grawprog 7y ago
>All of this contact tracing can be done in a privacy preserving way. Explain how having every person you're in contact with being tracked by governments and corporations can be done in a 'privacy preserving way'. The very concept of contact tracing is probably the greatest violation of privacy I've seen proposed yet.
- CubsFan1060 7y ago
  Serious question -- have you looked into it at all how this works?
- jws 7y ago
  Read the spec, but in a nutshell you only report your tokens if you test positive. Then other people check to see if they have seen any reported tokens using a clever algorithm that doesn't involve them reporting all the tokens they have seen. The central authority just has a list of tokens from infected people. A corrupt central authority could also massively deploy token recorders across an area and then see when and where the infected people were seen, but governments already have that capability just from the cellular systems.
- raphaelj 7y ago
  It's totally possible to create an anonymous and decentralised contact tracing app that does not share private data. That is what Apple-Google are working on, and what projects such as D3P-T, or my hobby contact tracing app [1] are trying to achieve. --- [1] https://github.com/RaphaelJ/covid-tracer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/RaphaelJ/covid-tracer/blob/master/README....
- DennisP 7y ago
  Simple. The system doesn't track every person you're in contact with. A simple method is to have phones directly exchange random numbers over bluetooth. If and only if someone tests positive, they publish their phone's recent random number transmissions. All phones download all published random numbers (just random numbers, no personal info) and see whether they've received any of them via bluetooth. This way the phone knows whether it's been in contact with someone who tested positive, but nobody else knows. Since the user has a strong incentive to get a covid test at that point, that's fine.
Reason077 7y ago
My advice to the NHS developers would be: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. The effectiveness of a contact tracing app scales with adoption. A sketchy, battery-draining implementation with questionable privacy may not see widespread adoption.
- merrvk 7y ago
  I doubt the developers have much input, will be some incompetent dinosaurs in middle management pushing for this.
- kristianc 7y ago
  > A sketchy, battery-draining implementation with questionable privacy may not see widespread adoption. A battery draining implementation may be the best they can do by themselves, and, from past form, the lack of privacy is a feature and not a bug. They’ve really gone out of their way to adopt a centralized solution, when a decentralized solution would be better in almost every way.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
What is the issue with privacy? The point is to get a list of close contacts, if needed (someone has tested positive), for a limited period of time (until the epidemic has ended). The privacy issue is minimal, certainly compared to the situation we are in. Do you really think that the government will go over these data to find out that you tend to have close contacts with your neighbour's wife very often? Let's keep a sense of proportion and let's calm down. This is getting very irrational. Anyway, since they do not seem to be willing to make contact tracing mandatory, these apps will remain a curiosity until this is over. Then historians will be able to debate whether this was all a distraction or a costly lack of political courage.
rndgermandude 7y ago
>Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. No. They already have their act together by providing only an API that cannot be abused by authoritarian regimes to do whatever, and keep stupid/badly advised politicians such as my own German government at bay. I hope they keep that line. The reason Germany switched the approach finally was the public pressure by a) having Google/Apple stay course and b) the German public - learning from journalists and other experts - that there in fact was a less privacy-invasive approach that according to many if not most epidemiologists wasn't any worse either for tracking the pandemic.
breischl 7y ago
>can have data housed in each country where they see fit Hadn't thought of this until you mentioned it, but having it only work within a country could significantly hinder the ability to trace imported cases (ie, cases from travelers). If the data is housed in country-of-citizenship, then travelers would not notify people they contact while abroad. If the data is housed in country-of-current-location, then people who test positive while abroad might not notify people in their home country whom they contacted before leaving. There might also be failures cases when they return home, but those could probably be solved with careful implementation. Regardless, this seems like a case where a single international, globally-accessible registry is useful. And therefore privacy becomes a very important concern.
- garmaine 7y ago
  What travelers.
  - breischl 7y ago
    Fair point right now, but that's not going to be the case forever. And once things start to open up again and cases are less common, this kind of contact tracing will become even more important to track down new outbreaks.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    The ones who live in Germany and work in France. Replace with most European countries.
  - MandieD 7y ago
    Residents of a country where they are not a citizen, like me (American living in Germany). A year from now, I might decide to visit my home country, and even be allowed back in, and if I stood in the customs line in Amsterdam near a Frenchman who hung out with someone in Montreal who turned up positive, it would be in everyone's interest for me to know I was exposed. Even traveling between Munich and Nuremberg, a one hour trip, I might be on a train near an Austrian who saw no reason to leave Munich during all this heading up to Berlin to finish a consulting contract, but a week ago had been in a meeting with a German who turned up positive. Our Austrian consultant would have been allowed to stay this past "shelter-in-place" month if she had a lease on an apartment and had registered it as her primary residence - no residence permit required, as she's an EU citizen. Again, it would be in everyone's interest for the three of us (and everyone we had much time around) to know about when the exposure took place and that we might need to self-quarantine/be tested.
Mvandenbergh 7y ago
Note that DP-3T and PEPP-PT are both privacy "preserving" protocols. They make different trade-offs between threat models and ultimate levels of privacy, but these are both vast improvements over the pervasive centralised geolocation data collection used in China and South Korea. I think DP-3T is the better choice, and Germany has clearly come to that decision as well (helped, no doubt, by the fact that this is the protocol that will receive API support) but I think it is reasonable to come to the conclusion that PEPP-PT is better.
- temac 7y ago
  Depends from who you want to be kept private. I've a hard time describing PEPP-PT "privacy preserving" the same way as DP-3T, especially as far as the central server is concerned and the blind trust I must put in it, but I admit this is still better than China like solutions. As for the trade-offs concerning privacy, it is true that DP-3T is not perfectly more private than PEPP-PT from a theoretical point of view (and nor the inverse), but this concern seems weird from a practical point of view and I have a hard time figuring out practical attacks doable against the public with DP-3T but not with PEPP-PT that would not be the sign of far worse problems...
NicoJuicy 7y ago
> Palentir Big warning here, i know they tried persuade multiple countries, but I'm so glad to be living in Europe. ( They do have some business here though) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/palantir-in-talks-with-germany-france-for-virus-fighting-tool https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/palantir-... At least Germany is using the best possible solution. I'm pretty sure a fair amount of bribe/lobby money is involved in the US. Can't find much sources about them in Europe currently : https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultation/displaylobbyist.do?id=553786035745-66 https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultatio...
mlindner 7y ago
> Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. Absolutely not. That has way too much temptation for any government to utterly abuse. Simply creating it is opening a pandora's box and should not be done.

anon102010 7y ago

I will never touch / install contact tracing if it can be backdoored into global surveilance. Apple has built a reputation for at least trying to preserve some user privacy. Their current proposal keeps it simple, your privacy is preserved and benefits for exposure notification (FAR beyond current horrendous govt efforts in terms of speed of notification etc) are there. They need to get their act together, and ignore folks trying to backdoor their systems.

0xBeefFed 7y ago
It should be noted that your privacy is not preserved if you test positive and need to upload your Daily Tracing Keys to a server. Your broadcast IDs for an entire day can be linked together, making it easier to de-anonymize you. I understand that they use Daily Tracing Keys to reduce the demand of the backend server, but I think it would be better for user privacy if they either reduced the linkable period from a day to say an hour, or used an unlinkable design.
- pintxo 7y ago
  In case you test positive, and we actually have the resources to trace your contacts, your privacy will be gone in todays system for sure. As you'll have to provide information about your recent contacts to the authorities performing the contact tracing. At least that's how I understand our local law (Germany). So I don't think its necessarily worse doing it with an App than doing it the old fashioned way. Sure digital traces are always easier to abuse, but then on the other hand, because things get automated, actually less people might get access to your data. Which would be a privacy win. I believe what's even more important than how we design the app, is how we design the legal framework around it. We do need rock solid laws, having enforceable data retention periods, and that limit access to the pare minimum needed. Unfortunately, our track record for the design of such laws has not been too good over the last years.
  - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
    The difference is that the old system relied on human memory which is fallible, not to mention you can omit details which would lead to further trouble (infidelities for one). In this system the only control a user has is to turn off bluetooth, or leave their phone at home if Apple/Google override the users ability to turn this off.
    - skybrian 7y ago
      I think it's up to you to upload the data? It seems like it depends how the app is designed. The protocol doesn't specify it.
      - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
        The protocol states that it will upload the Diagnosis Keys, a set of Daily Tracing Keys relevant to your exposure. So in short, if this is the case it forces the user to either upload all their keys or none. I would like to note that a v1.1 has recently been released, my information is about v1.0.
        Reelin 7y ago
        The specification (at least v1.1) contains nothing about uploading keys. The API appears to provide only the minimum required for protocol implementation. The ENSelfExposureInfoRequest class can be used by an app to obtain diagnosis keys for the previous 14 days. What an app does with those keys is up to whoever implements it. https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact-tracing/pdf/ExposureNotification-FrameworkDocumentationv1.1.pdf https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...
        0xBeefFed 7y ago
        That does not seem to line up with their cryptography specification, which is where I am getting my information from. Thank you for mentioning this
- xfitm3 7y ago
  If I keep my phone in a RF blocking bag and remove it only when needed I will have some semblance of privacy. I don't care about push notifications.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Well, let's keep in mind it is decentralised, so only people who have been in contact with you can correlate it with your location at a given time in the past. Not the whole world nor a central authority. And even is someone goes to that extent to track your identity down, I am not sure that local de-anonymisation is a problem. This is not something like HIV. I don't think there is any social stigma to catching the coronavirus. If you catch it you should self-isolate, and it will be obvious to the people around you that you got it. And if you don't want to self-isolate and want to hide it, what is the point to self declare that you got contaminated on the app in the first place?
  - jstarfish 7y ago
    > I don't think there is any social stigma to catching the coronavirus. "In Mexico, Colombia, India, the Philippines, Australia and other countries, people terrified by the highly infectious virus are lashing out at medical professionals — kicking them off buses, evicting them from apartments, even dousing them with water mixed with chlorine." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-doctors-nurses-attack-mexico-ivory-coast/2020/04/08/545896a0-7835-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronaviru... ...and these are cases where the victims don't even have the virus. Disease has always carried stigma. We tend to lash out at things we don't understand. History has seen everything from leper colonies to menstruating women herded into tents. You or I may be able to rationalize it and say "well, shit, the test was positive-- time to self-isolate" but plenty of plebes will use it as cause to incite a witch hunt, especially if a loved one dies from it and transmission is attributable to you.
    - cm2187 7y ago
      OK, that's a fair point, but it would take someone uneducated that believes in the stigma to also be a tech wiz to collect and correlate the data. Presumably the app won't tell you when and where the contact happened (and if so, no implementation of contact tracing is anonymous since the app won't know that you were in a busy bus full of strangers or in a small office with a single colleague).
- red0point 7y ago
  Valid point. DP3T (in one configuration) adresses this and lets you filter out certain parts that you do not wish to disclose. Thus, this then requires you to upload all broadcast identities used in the relevant timeframe, but because of space-related issues is then „compressed“ using a Cuckoo-Filter. This, however, yields false-positives. To eliminate those to a managable amount, it further requires more space. So, this has a tradeoff. Personally I don‘t think that linking multiple IDs in a day is a big intrusion of your privacy (and remember, it‘s only disclosed to anyone for the timeframe that is epidemologically relevant) - full de-anonymization still requires some second channel, such as cameras or the like - which can be linked together without those Broadcast IDs anyways.
  - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
    The unlinked DP-3T is one extreme, there is a happy medium if developers don't want to use Cuckoo Filters or Bloom Filters due to false positives, which is to decrease the linkable period. If the period was an hour, people could freely share legitimate tokens for their commute, but hide the ones where they had an hour long 1-1 with their manager.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    The thing with Bloom/Cuckoo filters is that you can play around with the parameters and, for example, provide a set of filters for a day in such a way that the app users can do a binary search. It never provides a false negative so all positives can download their set-up filters until they're satisfied. The filter that DP3T are describing isn't that much bigger than the DTK set anyway.
- user5994461 7y ago
  It's hard to test positive given the extremely limited supply of tests and all the effort you'd have to go through to get tested. I really can't imagine anybody willingly testing -more so with new invasive tracking- unless they are really ill and in need of medical attention.
  - 0xBeefFed 7y ago
    The issue is, if your putting the risk on infected users, what is the benefit to them to release their tokens? They are already at risk, this just makes them bigger targets.
- azinman2 7y ago
  This is almost never actually the case. Your daily keys are random, so the only way to know it's you is for someone to monitor bluetooth devices near by, and associate those keys with a physical identity... which becomes very difficult unless there's only one other person you come into contact with. In practice, it provides about the best anonymity you could ask for.
- marblar 7y ago
  The recorded broadcast IDs can be linked together, but only if they are somehow gathered from all of the devices that have been near you. As far as I can tell, the spec doesn't include recorded broadcast IDs ever leaving the device.

jupp0r 7y ago

> Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. It should be optional for people, but it should be part of the OS, and it should just be presented to the countries as ready to go with just a little bit of integration. That way we can force everyone to respect user privacy and not do sketchy contact tracing apps. I think that's a terrible idea. Think about how somebody can mark themselves as being infected. Normally you'd want this to be authorized by a doctor or similar, or maybe just by reporting symptoms if the situation is dire. Google and Apple rightfully did not want to be involved with these decisions, they just want to provide a way to detect contacts via bluetooth while still mandating preservation of their users privacy.

8ytecoder 7y ago
Parent said a framework. Technically, the framework could be designed in such a way that they whitelist apps or agencies that can do that. Or you’d be given a code to authenticate the results and so on.
- jupp0r 7y ago
  Sure, but look at how much governments resent the current limitations already. If they started mandating how doctors authenticate against the app and other processes that are wildly different between countries, they might end up with no countries using their framework.
- azinman2 7y ago
  That's exactly what's happening.

9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago

How can governments or individuals check if its implemented the way they claim? Phones are black boxes, read source code and hope it is what it reads?

cm2187 7y ago
Apparently you just need to trust GCHQ, who advised them. There isn't another agency privacy minded people would rather trust (apart perhaps its US and Chinese equivalents).

Despegar 7y ago

>Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible That's exactly what they're doing.

Reason077 7y ago
The timeframe for the Apple-Google solution is unclear. I’ve seen “later this year” mentioned rather than days, weeks, or months.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  I originally heard May, now it's being suggested that it's this week or next.
- djrogers 7y ago
  The official timeframe has been 'May' ever since the original announcement. First version of the API is now reported to be available on April 28th: https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/apple-contact-tracing-april-28/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/23/apple-contact-tracing-april-2...

grawprog 7y ago

>All of this contact tracing can be done in a privacy preserving way. Explain how having every person you're in contact with being tracked by governments and corporations can be done in a 'privacy preserving way'. The very concept of contact tracing is probably the greatest violation of privacy I've seen proposed yet.

CubsFan1060 7y ago
Serious question -- have you looked into it at all how this works?
jws 7y ago
Read the spec, but in a nutshell you only report your tokens if you test positive. Then other people check to see if they have seen any reported tokens using a clever algorithm that doesn't involve them reporting all the tokens they have seen. The central authority just has a list of tokens from infected people. A corrupt central authority could also massively deploy token recorders across an area and then see when and where the infected people were seen, but governments already have that capability just from the cellular systems.
raphaelj 7y ago
It's totally possible to create an anonymous and decentralised contact tracing app that does not share private data. That is what Apple-Google are working on, and what projects such as D3P-T, or my hobby contact tracing app [1] are trying to achieve. --- [1] https://github.com/RaphaelJ/covid-tracer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/RaphaelJ/covid-tracer/blob/master/README....
DennisP 7y ago
Simple. The system doesn't track every person you're in contact with. A simple method is to have phones directly exchange random numbers over bluetooth. If and only if someone tests positive, they publish their phone's recent random number transmissions. All phones download all published random numbers (just random numbers, no personal info) and see whether they've received any of them via bluetooth. This way the phone knows whether it's been in contact with someone who tested positive, but nobody else knows. Since the user has a strong incentive to get a covid test at that point, that's fine.

Reason077 7y ago

My advice to the NHS developers would be: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. The effectiveness of a contact tracing app scales with adoption. A sketchy, battery-draining implementation with questionable privacy may not see widespread adoption.

merrvk 7y ago
I doubt the developers have much input, will be some incompetent dinosaurs in middle management pushing for this.
kristianc 7y ago
> A sketchy, battery-draining implementation with questionable privacy may not see widespread adoption. A battery draining implementation may be the best they can do by themselves, and, from past form, the lack of privacy is a feature and not a bug. They’ve really gone out of their way to adopt a centralized solution, when a decentralized solution would be better in almost every way.

mytailorisrich 7y ago

What is the issue with privacy? The point is to get a list of close contacts, if needed (someone has tested positive), for a limited period of time (until the epidemic has ended). The privacy issue is minimal, certainly compared to the situation we are in. Do you really think that the government will go over these data to find out that you tend to have close contacts with your neighbour's wife very often? Let's keep a sense of proportion and let's calm down. This is getting very irrational. Anyway, since they do not seem to be willing to make contact tracing mandatory, these apps will remain a curiosity until this is over. Then historians will be able to debate whether this was all a distraction or a costly lack of political courage.

rndgermandude 7y ago

>Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. No. They already have their act together by providing only an API that cannot be abused by authoritarian regimes to do whatever, and keep stupid/badly advised politicians such as my own German government at bay. I hope they keep that line. The reason Germany switched the approach finally was the public pressure by a) having Google/Apple stay course and b) the German public - learning from journalists and other experts - that there in fact was a less privacy-invasive approach that according to many if not most epidemiologists wasn't any worse either for tracking the pandemic.

breischl 7y ago

>can have data housed in each country where they see fit Hadn't thought of this until you mentioned it, but having it only work within a country could significantly hinder the ability to trace imported cases (ie, cases from travelers). If the data is housed in country-of-citizenship, then travelers would not notify people they contact while abroad. If the data is housed in country-of-current-location, then people who test positive while abroad might not notify people in their home country whom they contacted before leaving. There might also be failures cases when they return home, but those could probably be solved with careful implementation. Regardless, this seems like a case where a single international, globally-accessible registry is useful. And therefore privacy becomes a very important concern.

garmaine 7y ago
What travelers.
- breischl 7y ago
  Fair point right now, but that's not going to be the case forever. And once things start to open up again and cases are less common, this kind of contact tracing will become even more important to track down new outbreaks.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  The ones who live in Germany and work in France. Replace with most European countries.
- MandieD 7y ago
  Residents of a country where they are not a citizen, like me (American living in Germany). A year from now, I might decide to visit my home country, and even be allowed back in, and if I stood in the customs line in Amsterdam near a Frenchman who hung out with someone in Montreal who turned up positive, it would be in everyone's interest for me to know I was exposed. Even traveling between Munich and Nuremberg, a one hour trip, I might be on a train near an Austrian who saw no reason to leave Munich during all this heading up to Berlin to finish a consulting contract, but a week ago had been in a meeting with a German who turned up positive. Our Austrian consultant would have been allowed to stay this past "shelter-in-place" month if she had a lease on an apartment and had registered it as her primary residence - no residence permit required, as she's an EU citizen. Again, it would be in everyone's interest for the three of us (and everyone we had much time around) to know about when the exposure took place and that we might need to self-quarantine/be tested.

Mvandenbergh 7y ago

Note that DP-3T and PEPP-PT are both privacy "preserving" protocols. They make different trade-offs between threat models and ultimate levels of privacy, but these are both vast improvements over the pervasive centralised geolocation data collection used in China and South Korea. I think DP-3T is the better choice, and Germany has clearly come to that decision as well (helped, no doubt, by the fact that this is the protocol that will receive API support) but I think it is reasonable to come to the conclusion that PEPP-PT is better.

temac 7y ago
Depends from who you want to be kept private. I've a hard time describing PEPP-PT "privacy preserving" the same way as DP-3T, especially as far as the central server is concerned and the blind trust I must put in it, but I admit this is still better than China like solutions. As for the trade-offs concerning privacy, it is true that DP-3T is not perfectly more private than PEPP-PT from a theoretical point of view (and nor the inverse), but this concern seems weird from a practical point of view and I have a hard time figuring out practical attacks doable against the public with DP-3T but not with PEPP-PT that would not be the sign of far worse problems...

NicoJuicy 7y ago

> Palentir Big warning here, i know they tried persuade multiple countries, but I'm so glad to be living in Europe. ( They do have some business here though) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/palantir-in-talks-with-germany-france-for-virus-fighting-tool https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/palantir-... At least Germany is using the best possible solution. I'm pretty sure a fair amount of bribe/lobby money is involved in the US. Can't find much sources about them in Europe currently : https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultation/displaylobbyist.do?id=553786035745-66 https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/consultatio...

mlindner 7y ago

> Google and Apple need to get their act together though, and just provide a contact tracing framework as part of the OS that is compatible, and can have data housed in each country where they see fit. Absolutely not. That has way too much temptation for any government to utterly abuse. Simply creating it is opening a pandora's box and should not be done.