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I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I though

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this. But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building and operating the service, which is also significant). When I first heard about this, I thought they were going to build a pair of apps for Android and iOS. It would come as part of an OTA update, and everyone around the world would be presented with a yes/no dialog asking whether they wanted to participate. Local governments would then be provided access to a SaaS that would let their contact tracers enter the tokens of known positive cases. I'm fairly sure that this would've resulted in significantly higher adoption rates. I have no idea what the point was, to require every government build/market/operate their own version of the exact same app. Maybe so that the backends could be independent? If so, I imagine there would be other ways to work around that, like offering a cloud service and/or an open source backend implementation for governments to self-host.

ponker 6y ago
They didn’t want the PR risk of owning the app
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thewebcount 6y ago
Exactly this! My spouse asked me the other day if Apple had released their contact tracing app yet. It was difficult to explain in lay terms that Apple was not releasing an app, just the tools to make an app.
thetanil 6y ago
Ask me if I will volunteer to give apple or google any more information than they already collect and my answer will always be no. I don't care what the reasoning. Germany did it right.
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  So they’d have to just force it then?
  - thetanil 6y ago
    Or do it like Germany, no centralized info store.
    - makomk 6y ago
      The German approach doesn't give your information to a German centralized info store, but apparently it does require agreeing to feed your location data to Google's own databases on Android devices: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/technology/google-covid-tracker-app.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/technology/google-covid-t...
- azinman2 6y ago
  Germany adopted the Apple/Google framework, which is exactly what an Apple/Google app would use. The whole point of the design is that it’s decentralized and you wouldn’t be giving Apple/Google more information.
  - Spearchucker 6y ago
    True. Except that the German app turns on EVERYTHING - LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS. And the carrier gets it all. I had the app installed for all of maybe 2 minutes because it did exactly what it claimed to do, but I'm not giving the carrier even more granular location info. The only thing I leave on when I leave the house is mobile data.
    - usr1106 6y ago
      I'm not in Germany and I don't have compatible phone. But from all I have read the claim about turning on GPS is plain wrong.
    - danijoo 6y ago
ridewinter 6y ago
The whole reason for Apple-Google getting involved in the first place was a technical issue that prevents Android from seeing iOS. Instead of solving that issue to allow a variety of solutions to be developed, they forced the entire world to create the apps in a certain way. It's not that their privacy-centric approach was wrong (although this article details its major shortcomings), but the suppression of trial & error definitely was wrong. Compounding this was Google-Apple's insistence that only government bodies can release exposure notification apps and you have a total absence of real innovation. It's no surprise that nothing has succeeded. The whole debacle is a case study in the effect of gatekeepers on innovation. As manual contract tracing teams here in the US become overwhelmed, how many lives could have been saved by a successful exposure notification app?
- zepto 6y ago
  If there were no gatekeepers on this, how much contact tracing fraud and malware would there be?
  - ridewinter 6y ago
    These would be good problems to have because they'd mean the apps were successful in the first place! Problems are solvable if we have the chance to solve them.
    - zepto 6y ago
      How would they mean the apps were successful? Why wouldn’t the outcome be that people didn’t use contact tracing apps because a bunch of them were scans and malware?
cl3misch 6y ago
I think the individual apps on top of the same framework are not identical in the way the data is collected and stored. AFAIK in some countries they have a centralized database, whereas e.g. in Germany all contact IDs are kept locally and only compared to a published (but anonymized) list of infected IDs.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  No, that's not the difference. The contacts are stored inside the system's framework. The difference is in how people report themselves as infected. That has to match the country's process for verification of the result.
usrusr 6y ago
There are two parts where local authorities need to be involved: troll-proofing the way people flag themselves as infected and translating exposure into actionable instructions/suggestions (e.g. different testing capacities require different testing strategies). I agree that Google/Apple could have done a lot more, like an OS-branded App with extensive functional localization in cooperation with local authorities. But looking back at how pretty much every country was initially trying very hard to avoid working with the OS makers Google/Apple might not be to blame at all for merely providing a minimal API instead of a complete turnkey solution. Governments all over the world were only coerced into adopting the API by malware countermeasures already present in the operating systems, almost like a sudden vindication of Lessig's old "code is law" claim.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Idk, maybe Google and Apple could do more, but I thought it was almost a wonder how fast Google and Apple came up with a workable framework.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  Probably because they were already using it internally for other purposes.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  Because it is not location tracking. It is simpler. It just records nearby pings of other phones.
xorcist 6y ago
Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have. This would however set a bad precedent on how this data is shared. Law enforcement is one thing, medial tracing is another. So instead they set out to build this BLE tracing toolkit, which is something that at best is intended for future use, when everyone has the requisite hardware and software installed. It wouldn't reach more than a minority of users today which severely limits its usefulness, all for the possibility of reaching into situations such as bus rides, where nobody really knows how contagious these situations are because we simply do not have enough knowledge of the virus yet. Real world measurements are also likely to be noisy (where someone carries their phone in their hand and another in their backpack with a water bottle) even if we could set a hard limit on a safe distance, which we can't. So maybe we will get something useful in the future, for the price of not exposing the data already available today. It is amusing that the BLE tracing toolkits were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to Google and Apple, the exact entities who already have fine grained location data on most people.
- Despegar 6y ago
  >They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have. Apple definitely could not have done this because they don't have this data.
  - nindalf 6y ago
    Even assuming for a second that Google stores the location of every user (they didn’t store mine), how would they do contact tracing when they don’t have access to data on iOS devices? Even assuming they did, what key would they join on? But no, a confident blanket assertion is made without providing any evidence.
grazhero99 6y ago
>Maybe so that the backends could be independent? Funny, I misread 'backends' as 'backdoors'.

ponker 6y ago

They didn’t want the PR risk of owning the app

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thewebcount 6y ago

Exactly this! My spouse asked me the other day if Apple had released their contact tracing app yet. It was difficult to explain in lay terms that Apple was not releasing an app, just the tools to make an app.

thetanil 6y ago

Ask me if I will volunteer to give apple or google any more information than they already collect and my answer will always be no. I don't care what the reasoning. Germany did it right.

nxpnsv 6y ago
So they’d have to just force it then?
- thetanil 6y ago
  Or do it like Germany, no centralized info store.
  - makomk 6y ago
    The German approach doesn't give your information to a German centralized info store, but apparently it does require agreeing to feed your location data to Google's own databases on Android devices: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/technology/google-covid-tracker-app.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/technology/google-covid-t...
azinman2 6y ago
Germany adopted the Apple/Google framework, which is exactly what an Apple/Google app would use. The whole point of the design is that it’s decentralized and you wouldn’t be giving Apple/Google more information.
- Spearchucker 6y ago
  True. Except that the German app turns on EVERYTHING - LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS. And the carrier gets it all. I had the app installed for all of maybe 2 minutes because it did exactly what it claimed to do, but I'm not giving the carrier even more granular location info. The only thing I leave on when I leave the house is mobile data.
  - usr1106 6y ago
    I'm not in Germany and I don't have compatible phone. But from all I have read the claim about turning on GPS is plain wrong.
  - danijoo 6y ago

ridewinter 6y ago

The whole reason for Apple-Google getting involved in the first place was a technical issue that prevents Android from seeing iOS. Instead of solving that issue to allow a variety of solutions to be developed, they forced the entire world to create the apps in a certain way. It's not that their privacy-centric approach was wrong (although this article details its major shortcomings), but the suppression of trial & error definitely was wrong. Compounding this was Google-Apple's insistence that only government bodies can release exposure notification apps and you have a total absence of real innovation. It's no surprise that nothing has succeeded. The whole debacle is a case study in the effect of gatekeepers on innovation. As manual contract tracing teams here in the US become overwhelmed, how many lives could have been saved by a successful exposure notification app?

zepto 6y ago
If there were no gatekeepers on this, how much contact tracing fraud and malware would there be?
- ridewinter 6y ago
  These would be good problems to have because they'd mean the apps were successful in the first place! Problems are solvable if we have the chance to solve them.
  - zepto 6y ago
    How would they mean the apps were successful? Why wouldn’t the outcome be that people didn’t use contact tracing apps because a bunch of them were scans and malware?

cl3misch 6y ago

I think the individual apps on top of the same framework are not identical in the way the data is collected and stored. AFAIK in some countries they have a centralized database, whereas e.g. in Germany all contact IDs are kept locally and only compared to a published (but anonymized) list of infected IDs.

johannes1234321 6y ago
No, that's not the difference. The contacts are stored inside the system's framework. The difference is in how people report themselves as infected. That has to match the country's process for verification of the result.

usrusr 6y ago

There are two parts where local authorities need to be involved: troll-proofing the way people flag themselves as infected and translating exposure into actionable instructions/suggestions (e.g. different testing capacities require different testing strategies). I agree that Google/Apple could have done a lot more, like an OS-branded App with extensive functional localization in cooperation with local authorities. But looking back at how pretty much every country was initially trying very hard to avoid working with the OS makers Google/Apple might not be to blame at all for merely providing a minimal API instead of a complete turnkey solution. Governments all over the world were only coerced into adopting the API by malware countermeasures already present in the operating systems, almost like a sudden vindication of Lessig's old "code is law" claim.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Idk, maybe Google and Apple could do more, but I thought it was almost a wonder how fast Google and Apple came up with a workable framework.

coronadisaster 6y ago
Probably because they were already using it internally for other purposes.
Tagbert 6y ago
Because it is not location tracking. It is simpler. It just records nearby pings of other phones.

xorcist 6y ago

Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing. Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have. This would however set a bad precedent on how this data is shared. Law enforcement is one thing, medial tracing is another. So instead they set out to build this BLE tracing toolkit, which is something that at best is intended for future use, when everyone has the requisite hardware and software installed. It wouldn't reach more than a minority of users today which severely limits its usefulness, all for the possibility of reaching into situations such as bus rides, where nobody really knows how contagious these situations are because we simply do not have enough knowledge of the virus yet. Real world measurements are also likely to be noisy (where someone carries their phone in their hand and another in their backpack with a water bottle) even if we could set a hard limit on a safe distance, which we can't. So maybe we will get something useful in the future, for the price of not exposing the data already available today. It is amusing that the BLE tracing toolkits were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to Google and Apple, the exact entities who already have fine grained location data on most people.

Despegar 6y ago
>They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have. Apple definitely could not have done this because they don't have this data.
- nindalf 6y ago
  Even assuming for a second that Google stores the location of every user (they didn’t store mine), how would they do contact tracing when they don’t have access to data on iOS devices? Even assuming they did, what key would they join on? But no, a confident blanket assertion is made without providing any evidence.

grazhero99 6y ago

>Maybe so that the backends could be independent? Funny, I misread 'backends' as 'backdoors'.