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I’m glad to see Schneier come out with an opinion against these apps. Up until now, it’s seemed like the privacy community has been almost excited about the ide

I’m glad to see Schneier come out with an opinion against these apps. Up until now, it’s seemed like the privacy community has been almost excited about the idea of these tracking apps. Maybe because it’s a cool academic problem? I don’t know. Take this DP-3T project for example. It’s really interesting tech, and a great group of people behind it. But the government doesn’t care for this nuance of what is privacy preserving tech and what is not. For now, maybe at the beginning, privacy will be emphasized. But the important part is conditioning citizens to be okay with the underlying idea of technology assisted self-surveillance, and compliance with notifications on their phone telling them to stay inside. Schneier raises the point of false positives, which is important with regards to this idea of conditioning. What do you do when you get a notification that someone “nearby” tested positive? Do you take time off work and isolate yourself in your house for two weeks, just because some beacon passed within two meters of you within the past two weeks? Even if you have no symptoms at all? Just because you got a notification on your phone? This just seems unrealistic to me. My other worry is the classic “slippery slope.” Maybe people are okay with these apps in their current form, if they’re privacy-preserving. (Personally, I doubt anyone outside tech can recognize the difference anyway, but let’s assume the wider populace takes its lead from us). Isn’t there a risk that eventually people will forget about the underlying details and privacy will be deemphasized? “You were okay with TrackingApp 1.0, why wouldn’t you be okay with TrackingApp 2.0?” If we give an inch now, will the government take a mile later? Who’s to say the emphasis on privacy will remain in place? Heck, it’s not even clear whether it will be in place from the beginning. The NHS is already saying they don’t want to use it, choosing instead to build their own centralized solution. Again — it’s extremely concerning to me to see the general vibe of excitement coming out of the tech community around these apps. I’m really disappointed and would expect to see more skepticism. So, kudos to Schneier for going against the grain here.

svdr 7y ago
And what if you can easily get tested if you get notified?
- xorfish 7y ago
  The Swiss COVID-19 Science Task force recommends a test at the beginning and the end of the Quarantine and if someone shows symptoms. https://ncs-tf.ch/en/policy-briefs https://ncs-tf.ch/en/policy-briefs --> Contact Tracing
tastroder 7y ago
That's good points Schneier does not make in this post imho. The conditioning / slippery slope argument also applies to countries that currently go with the, imho, more sensible architecture of DP3T. We've seen worrying calls for including a bunch of additional features in Germany, e.g. (voluntary) epidemiological data collection and an "immunity pass" (not from the government yet but still, worrying). I think the privacy community, at least in my bubble of the internet, was excited that the scientific consensus of DP3T > PEPP-PT/ROBERT/(the NHS approach) won out over lobby interests and from their perspective was deemed the safer option. It's not like they aren't discussing the broader implications of digital contact tracing from a bunch of angles, and I see calls for evaluating the proportionality and efficacy of these apps on Twitter pretty much daily. OTOH I don't really see how shallow dismissals of "it's plain dumb" like this blog post help the overall discussion honestly.
simion314 7y ago
>Schneier raises the point of false positives, which is important with regards to this idea of conditioning. What do you do when you get a notification that someone “nearby” tested positive? Do you take time off work and isolate yourself in your house for two weeks, Ideally we would have tests so in a community with no infection at the moment somebody is tested as infected you can inform and have all the other possible infected people tested. I suggest you consider covid as a training exercise for the next one, that one could have a 10% chance to kill your children, then would you prefer to get an alert and take measures or prefer to stay ignorant. In theory if you have few people infected , good testing and tracing you could lockdown only the infected and possibly infected people instead of locking everyone down.
blablabla123 7y ago
A crazy amount of statistical reasoning would have to be put into such an app to not trigger a false positive after a long shopping tour for instance and still have a reasonable true positive rate. The current numbers publicly available aren't even exploited to their fullest. IMHO assuming that the lethality is a constant (or a polynomial) would already be a treasure trove of knowledge, in order to approximate the number of untested cases. Also looking at the WHO dashboard, I have serious doubts anyone cares if there is actionable value for the population available. Maybe it would be more useful to start centralizing the numbers available already (PPE supplies, hospital usage, ...), throwing them into more realistic simulations and testing models. IMHO it's still not really clear why China has less cases than the US and why Taiwan and Sweden are doing just fine with only conservative lockdown measures. FWIW, it would also be helpful if Chinese institutions would publish if their tracking efforts have brought actually a provable difference.
xorfish 7y ago
Any contact tracing will produce false positives and false negatives. You will notify 20-50 people per infected person, most of them will not be infected. We only have a problem if the number of false positives is in the 200+ range and the rate of infections is relatively high. It is important to not that a short encounter will not put you into an at risk status. You need 15 minutes or whatever the health authority is long enough to make the tradeof between false negatives and false positives. If people follow the app or not will be mostly legal protection. Countries with weak worker protection will have a harder time getting people to comply voluntarily. I find slippery slope arguments weak. They can be used on anything to make the outcome much worse.
finnthehuman 7y ago
>Up until now, it’s seemed like the privacy community has been almost excited about the idea of these tracking apps. Maybe because it’s a cool academic problem? I don’t know. It's because 90% of the computer privacy community is people from the computer security community that like to LARP as if they didn't sell out the privacy ideals they used to hold. Computer security people were always more interested in playing with the tech than more-ethereal concepts like privacy and trust and their roles in society. Add in the fact you can make a lot more money bolting encryption to a data exfiltration vector than leading a principled stand against the surveillance system that uses it. Stir for 20 years, and you have a bunch of people who need to admit to themselves that they're today's authoritarian boomers that love faux-rebellious rhetoric.
peterwoerner 7y ago
We already gave an inch and the government took a mile. Closing down state parks and playgrounds. Making it illegal to play with the kids next door. I was probably pro tracking app a month or two ago, but the draconian measures taken by some governments (Michigan, Wisconsin) has changed my mind. Its going to lead to abuse abuse abuse abuse.
- chasd00 7y ago
  We saw the same thing with the patriot act and the post-9/11 world. Give an inch, they take a mile. I understand the situation and the need but once politicians get a taste of the power they can't give it up. It's like a drug to them. Who was it that said "government should never get so big that you can't drag it to the bathroom and drown it in the tub"?
  - severine 7y ago
    Grover Norquist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast Counterpoint: When you drown the government in the bathtub, people die > https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/10/when-you-drown-government-bathtub-people-die/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/10/when-you-...
    - 22c 7y ago
      How many more people dying are we talking about had the US not drowned it's government in the bathtub? Is the average life expectancy in the US this year that much lower than in, let's say South Korea, Singapore or Taiwan? How about the p90/p99? We won't really know until all of this is over.
- sanderjd 7y ago
  I don't understand this argument. It's not like governors want to take that mile. They have literally no incentive to shut down playgrounds (in fact, politically, the incentive is the opposite), besides uncertainty around what does and doesn't matter for fighting the epidemic in their state. It continues to look like we got lucky that kids aren't really affected much by this, so maybe it would have been fine to leave playgrounds open and keep having play dates. There were indications of that early on, but also a high risk it wouldn't pan out. Playgrounds are exactly the kind of thing that are problematic for the spread of this illness: high-touch surfaces of the kind that this thing sticks to. If there were playgrounds for adults, they would be the most important things to shut down (indeed the closest thing to that - bars and clubs - will probably be the very last things to reopen). On top of that, kids cough a lot and put their hands in their mouths and just generally spread their fluids around. This would all be really bad news except that it doesn't seem like kids spread this much, for whatever reason. But we just got lucky with that, and taking that risk would not have been smart at the beginning of this. Going back to my first point: I don't understand the logic of this argument at all. Why do governors want to lock people inside? What is the benefit? I share concerns over government breaches of privacy, because I don't want politicians abusing their trove of information on people to hang on to power. I don't see how this is similar to that at all. If politicians in the US were using this to cancel elections where they're on the ballot, then I'm with you, that's worrisome, but that's not what's going on here. These governors are accepting a political hit on the bet that it is going to keep more of their people alive. Lay out for me the argument for why you think these leaders want to take this mile having been given this inch; why do they want to close down state parks and playgrounds and cancel your playdates? What do you claim is in it for them?

svdr 7y ago

And what if you can easily get tested if you get notified?

xorfish 7y ago
The Swiss COVID-19 Science Task force recommends a test at the beginning and the end of the Quarantine and if someone shows symptoms. https://ncs-tf.ch/en/policy-briefs https://ncs-tf.ch/en/policy-briefs --> Contact Tracing

tastroder 7y ago

That's good points Schneier does not make in this post imho. The conditioning / slippery slope argument also applies to countries that currently go with the, imho, more sensible architecture of DP3T. We've seen worrying calls for including a bunch of additional features in Germany, e.g. (voluntary) epidemiological data collection and an "immunity pass" (not from the government yet but still, worrying). I think the privacy community, at least in my bubble of the internet, was excited that the scientific consensus of DP3T > PEPP-PT/ROBERT/(the NHS approach) won out over lobby interests and from their perspective was deemed the safer option. It's not like they aren't discussing the broader implications of digital contact tracing from a bunch of angles, and I see calls for evaluating the proportionality and efficacy of these apps on Twitter pretty much daily. OTOH I don't really see how shallow dismissals of "it's plain dumb" like this blog post help the overall discussion honestly.

simion314 7y ago

>Schneier raises the point of false positives, which is important with regards to this idea of conditioning. What do you do when you get a notification that someone “nearby” tested positive? Do you take time off work and isolate yourself in your house for two weeks, Ideally we would have tests so in a community with no infection at the moment somebody is tested as infected you can inform and have all the other possible infected people tested. I suggest you consider covid as a training exercise for the next one, that one could have a 10% chance to kill your children, then would you prefer to get an alert and take measures or prefer to stay ignorant. In theory if you have few people infected , good testing and tracing you could lockdown only the infected and possibly infected people instead of locking everyone down.

blablabla123 7y ago

A crazy amount of statistical reasoning would have to be put into such an app to not trigger a false positive after a long shopping tour for instance and still have a reasonable true positive rate. The current numbers publicly available aren't even exploited to their fullest. IMHO assuming that the lethality is a constant (or a polynomial) would already be a treasure trove of knowledge, in order to approximate the number of untested cases. Also looking at the WHO dashboard, I have serious doubts anyone cares if there is actionable value for the population available. Maybe it would be more useful to start centralizing the numbers available already (PPE supplies, hospital usage, ...), throwing them into more realistic simulations and testing models. IMHO it's still not really clear why China has less cases than the US and why Taiwan and Sweden are doing just fine with only conservative lockdown measures. FWIW, it would also be helpful if Chinese institutions would publish if their tracking efforts have brought actually a provable difference.

xorfish 7y ago

Any contact tracing will produce false positives and false negatives. You will notify 20-50 people per infected person, most of them will not be infected. We only have a problem if the number of false positives is in the 200+ range and the rate of infections is relatively high. It is important to not that a short encounter will not put you into an at risk status. You need 15 minutes or whatever the health authority is long enough to make the tradeof between false negatives and false positives. If people follow the app or not will be mostly legal protection. Countries with weak worker protection will have a harder time getting people to comply voluntarily. I find slippery slope arguments weak. They can be used on anything to make the outcome much worse.

finnthehuman 7y ago

>Up until now, it’s seemed like the privacy community has been almost excited about the idea of these tracking apps. Maybe because it’s a cool academic problem? I don’t know. It's because 90% of the computer privacy community is people from the computer security community that like to LARP as if they didn't sell out the privacy ideals they used to hold. Computer security people were always more interested in playing with the tech than more-ethereal concepts like privacy and trust and their roles in society. Add in the fact you can make a lot more money bolting encryption to a data exfiltration vector than leading a principled stand against the surveillance system that uses it. Stir for 20 years, and you have a bunch of people who need to admit to themselves that they're today's authoritarian boomers that love faux-rebellious rhetoric.

peterwoerner 7y ago

We already gave an inch and the government took a mile. Closing down state parks and playgrounds. Making it illegal to play with the kids next door. I was probably pro tracking app a month or two ago, but the draconian measures taken by some governments (Michigan, Wisconsin) has changed my mind. Its going to lead to abuse abuse abuse abuse.

chasd00 7y ago
We saw the same thing with the patriot act and the post-9/11 world. Give an inch, they take a mile. I understand the situation and the need but once politicians get a taste of the power they can't give it up. It's like a drug to them. Who was it that said "government should never get so big that you can't drag it to the bathroom and drown it in the tub"?
- severine 7y ago
  Grover Norquist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast Counterpoint: When you drown the government in the bathtub, people die > https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/10/when-you-drown-government-bathtub-people-die/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/10/when-you-...
  - 22c 7y ago
    How many more people dying are we talking about had the US not drowned it's government in the bathtub? Is the average life expectancy in the US this year that much lower than in, let's say South Korea, Singapore or Taiwan? How about the p90/p99? We won't really know until all of this is over.
sanderjd 7y ago
I don't understand this argument. It's not like governors want to take that mile. They have literally no incentive to shut down playgrounds (in fact, politically, the incentive is the opposite), besides uncertainty around what does and doesn't matter for fighting the epidemic in their state. It continues to look like we got lucky that kids aren't really affected much by this, so maybe it would have been fine to leave playgrounds open and keep having play dates. There were indications of that early on, but also a high risk it wouldn't pan out. Playgrounds are exactly the kind of thing that are problematic for the spread of this illness: high-touch surfaces of the kind that this thing sticks to. If there were playgrounds for adults, they would be the most important things to shut down (indeed the closest thing to that - bars and clubs - will probably be the very last things to reopen). On top of that, kids cough a lot and put their hands in their mouths and just generally spread their fluids around. This would all be really bad news except that it doesn't seem like kids spread this much, for whatever reason. But we just got lucky with that, and taking that risk would not have been smart at the beginning of this. Going back to my first point: I don't understand the logic of this argument at all. Why do governors want to lock people inside? What is the benefit? I share concerns over government breaches of privacy, because I don't want politicians abusing their trove of information on people to hang on to power. I don't see how this is similar to that at all. If politicians in the US were using this to cancel elections where they're on the ballot, then I'm with you, that's worrisome, but that's not what's going on here. These governors are accepting a political hit on the bet that it is going to keep more of their people alive. Lay out for me the argument for why you think these leaders want to take this mile having been given this inch; why do they want to close down state parks and playgrounds and cancel your playdates? What do you claim is in it for them?