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Stop building tools to enable fascists. Has anyone not learned the lessons of history?
by riffic 6y ago
Stop building tools to enable fascists. Has anyone not learned the lessons of history?
- AlwaysBCoding 6y agohaha surveillance state go brrrr
- logicchains 6y agoFreedom can't survive long if people aren't willing to make sacrifices for it.
- scarlac 6y agoI would encourage you to read up on the technology behind it. It was intended to be anonymous to such an extend that some governments went out and said they wouldn't use it because of the lack of tracking. The methodology has also been laid out quite extensively, and it's an opt-in approach.
- riffic 6y agoIt's not about tracking locations, it's about tracking social connections. I'm a skeptic it won't see abuses.
- giovannibajo1 6y agoRead the technical documentation and try to design an attack scenario, before deciding that it certainly can be abused
- devilmoon 6y agoHow can it track social connections when the codes are anonymous by default and can be deanonymized only with an OTP code you generate yourself?
- jlokier 6y agoIf lots of people are pressured to deanonymize, which they are in this case (it's your civic duty!), that's not a very strong system because a lot can be inferred from "gaps" between people that you are linked to in other contexts. Just like I can avoid using Facebook but they can still, in principle, keep a shadow profile with lots of details about my life, inferred by putting together knowledge from other people. Just like when I joined LinkedIn it already knew who I knew, without me entering anything except my name and email address (that was spooky, I didn't give it contacts or anything). Just like Google knows your personal interests, even if you delete all cookies at the end of every browsing session.
- riffic 6y agoAre networks of social connections a characteristic that can be fingerprinted just like many other identifying traits (gait detection, location and movement fingerprinting, keystroke forencics, stylometry and linguistic fingerprinting, patterns of timestamps, et cetera)?
- jlokier 6y agoI understand those concerns. But there has been real, high quality progress on handling data in ways that are mathematically designed to conserve privacy and limit surveillance to a specific, socially constructive purpose. The Google-Apple method is one of those. However, there is a lot of good work being done that is more advanced than that, which alas is not available right now but will be useful in future. It parallels the high quality progress we have seen in areas like encryption, and in cryptocurrencies. I think it's completely right to have doubts. E.g. in another of my commments I wrote that I don't trust the UK government's current approach. But we are, slowly, also building tools to make fascism more difficult as well. If we can persuade the powers that be to use them, and verify that they are. It may be that if we don't make "good" contact-tracing tools available, someone will make worse contact-tracing tools and force people to use them, on grounds of necessity. It looks like that's already happening, with some countries adopting a central database approach, some countries making it the law to use them (e.g. India), and other countries using newer privacy-oriented contact-tracing approaches.