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> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach Maybe that's the point he intended to make, what he a
by usrusr 6y ago
> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this industry's only approach
Maybe that's the point he intended to make, what he actually wow is really just a collection of anecdotes about troubles with location based tracking. That's like realizing that it hurts if you hit yourself with a hammer and thus vowing to never again use a screw.
The closest thing be has to an argument against the decentralized proximity approach is a hand-wavy mention of the idea that there might be a possibility of false positives in a traffic jam.
The thing is that the conflict between manual tracing vs electronic exposure notification is a complete fantasy because the resources required to do one have zero overlap with the resources to do the other. Sure, automated exposure notification is wildly imprecise. But so is viral spread, it's a game of probabilities with or without the uncertainties of Bluetooth beacons. But beacon tracing scales where manual tracing doesn't. In a high incidence situation manual tracing will quickly run out of call center agents and in a low incidence situation social distancing and manual location logging (e.g. documentation of restaurant table allocation) will quickly erode to the point where a very, very large fraction of contacts cannot be manually reconstructed. And even in the moderate incidence band where manual tracing works best it has blind spots where beacon logging can fill in, not only anonymous exposures like public transit but also the entire field of "awkward" contacts that Doctorow spent an entire paragraph on. "And then there's this survival sex worker I occasionally meet, here's his number" surely isn't a line that comes up often in a manual tracing conversation.
But yeah, it must be fun to drum up negativity about exposure notification apps, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy when nobody is using them.
- throwanem 6y agoYou seem to know a lot about the problems of contact tracing! From what demonstrably successful work, or at least training or experience in the field, do you derive your perspective? And it's not just a simple question of opportunity cost - or, rather, it is, but you're wrong about in which direction. The same people who are building useless junk that nobody uses absolutely could be building tools, like the one I worked on years back, that actually empower clinicians and public health workers to produce datasets susceptible to useful analysis. Doctorow's argument, with which I agree, is that they aren't doing that because it's difficult, exacting, unglamorous work, exactly the sort toward which our industry absolutely sucks at incentivizing anyone. So that's not what happens, and instead we get a bunch of pointless data about physical adjacency that's totally devoid of the kind of context it needs for any meaningful analysis to be possible - but which can be misused to any number of harmful ends.
- usrusr 6y agoIt's one of the fields where I confidently claim parity with Cory Doctorow. I wish I could say the same about writing.
- throwanem 6y agoParity of subject matter expertise with Cory Doctorow might mean something in an argument with Cory Doctorow. He's not here right now, at least as far as I'm aware.
- dm319 6y agoTaking one step back, this applies to coronavirus and data in general. We don't have accurate data on case numbers, because testing capacity has varied with time and between countries, and the precise specificity and sensitivity of the PCR and serology tests, in the real world, are not known. There are biases is reporting of the illness, deaths, those tested. Never before have we had so much data to deal with such a challenge to our society, and yet, the data we do have is not representative of the natural process, and often doesn't help us to understand a model of what is going on. Getting data on mobile phone adjacency is just adding to the large amount of poor quality data.
- usrusr 6y ago> The same people who are building useless junk that nobody uses absolutely could be building tools, like the one I worked on years back, that actually empower clinicians and public health workers to produce datasets susceptible to useful analysis. I disagree: the last thing we need right now is giving the impression that manual contact tracers are building extensive shadow profile databases. Which can be misused to any number of harmful ends. Unfortunately many people would happily focus only on that, promoting the idea that . And they wouldn't even be entirely wrong about it, as illustrated by dozens of cases in supposedly privacy-sensitive Germany where police has been accessing even the most innocuous form of manual contact tracing datasets, paper attendance lists held offline at restaurants. Decentralized rolling beacon tracing is orders of magnitude more frugal with PII. And yes, it's still no substitute for manual tracing. Just like manual tracing isn't a substitute for beacon exposure (and yes, this wouldn't be true at all if we were talking about STD).