It’s intuitive that contact tracing APIs, as Google and Apple PMs have conceived them, somehow help you. Some health officials have an opinion on what kind of s

It’s intuitive that contact tracing APIs, as Google and Apple PMs have conceived them, somehow help you. Some health officials have an opinion on what kind of software would help them, saying something extremely well publicized by Apple and Google will not. This conflict plays out with masks, taking flights, not being able to smell as a diagnostic, and any number of widely reported guidance that has some evidence, some intuition, tremendous exposure in social and traditional media but no conclusive, registered control trialed (RCT) results. A line of logic that goes, “in the absence of conclusive evidence, play it safe” doesn’t give you an answer for “track locations and surveil, to collect more data and answer questions better, versus collect a minimal amount of data in the interest of some other kind of safety called privacy.” There’s no universal rationalist approach to your opinion here. You have to decide whether to trust John Gruber or whatever health officials WashPo quoted. RCT is a real line for people in medicine, at least for people who aren’t looking to make a buck developing a drug. In the same way health officials don’t strictly care if the stock market goes down, they wouldn’t strictly care if Google and Apple’s brand would be impacted by detailed location tracking. At the end of the day health officials, like the UCSF prof quoted here, just want people to be safe and healthy. The counterpoint is, what do Apple and Google want? To do something? The appearance of doing something? They are not health organizations. John Gruber isn’t a doctor. These are different perspectives and goals, not an argument over how to achieve common goals. Why crank out and die on the hill of a giant company’s PR team?