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Norwegian Covid-19 contact tracing app banned by the Data Protection Authority

inetsee 6y ago
TLDR: The old COVID-19 contact tracing app was banned in June. "A new app is already being planned" (As of October 24, 2020). "The new app expected to be implemented this year (2020)." Meantime: US CDC has issued "Warning – Level 3, COVID-19 risk in Norway is high". https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/warning/coronavirus-norway https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/warning/coronavirus-nor... "CDC recommends travelers avoid all nonessential international travel to Norway."
holimoer820 6y ago
Does anybody here know if these contact tracing apps can possibly work? Is bluetooth enough to trace reliably?
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  In Singapore we have QR code’s and every mall/shop/building you must sign in. It works. Every case we know where a person visited and track down other who visited the same places at those times to get them tested. We are at 0 community cases. Anyone who says lockdowns and masks don’t work doesn’t know what they are taking about. The reasons they don’t work is because people won’t take this whole thing seriously.
  - johnisgood 6y ago
    > In Singapore we have QR code’s and every mall/shop/building you must sign in. It works. Every case we know where a person visited and track down Good lord. Is it mandatory?
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      Absolutely, and its great. There's alot of people out, business as usual, 100% mask usage. 0 community cases (only import as people return to Singapore, but they are quarantined on arrival) The only countries I would want to be in, is Singapore, Taiwan, or New Zealand. I wouldn't feel save in any other country.
      - johnisgood 6y ago
        Yeah, you got all the tech ready to go and become China's social credit system. People are already using it as it is mandatory. What is stopping the Government actually from doing it more "evil", perhaps in the name of counter-terrorism, saving the children, or something like that. I do not know, it reeks of anti-privacy and it is dystopian to me. There are many ways of convincing people to wear a mask. Regardless, my entire family tested positive. No symptoms.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Lockdowns and masks are pretty effective, but being an relatively small island nation with border security seems to be pretty important too.
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      Yes, that makes it easier to enforce for sure. But majority of the people here are also willing to do it. No one here feels like their 'rights' are taken away or that the Government made up the virus to suppress the citizens.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - holimoer820 6y ago
    What about JUST bluetooth?
butz 6y ago
Why does every country has to reinvent a wheel by building their own contact tracing apps (and failing in respecting privacy by doing so)? Wasn't there already one app open sourced, and if I'm not mistaken, it was made in EU, so GDPR compliance is guaranteed. Not to mention solutions provided by Google and Apple, but I cannot comment on GDPR compliance for those.
- neom 6y ago
  NearForm have done a lot of work on this: https://github.com/nearform https://github.com/nearform
- Andaith 6y ago
  Singapore open-sourced their app, and Australia basically took the code and used it. Haven't really heard much about the app any more. Now it's all QR codes. I don't think the apps work that well with Apple's bluetooth permissions...
  - sundvor 6y ago
    Australia then proceeded to bury its use. No references to it any of the updates, for months, never a question until a recent test when they asked if we have the app installed. That they couldn't make it work on iPhone, to have it run in the background, was probably what sealed it. No such issues on Android.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > and Australia basically took the code and used it. Australia basically paid $6million to a contracting company to take the Singapore code and badly reuse it... It was a pork barrelling rort from the start. The one good thing to come out of it was a learned a lot more about how to use Ghidra to reverse Android apks... (I had a great deal of fun, along with a group of other people, seeing just where the .au app differed from the .sg GitHub code...)
- snorremd 6y ago
  NIPH (Norwegian Institute of Public Health) has contracted Netcompany, the team behind the danish contact tracing app), to build it. https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2020/netcompany-to-develop-app-for-digital-contact-tracing/ https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2020/netcompany-to-develop-app-fo... So they won’t be starting quite from scratch.
supernova87a 6y ago
Seems governments are struggling with the idea of people's personal information being kept private while their germs are spewed all over the public.
- burnthrow 6y ago
  > their germs are spewed all over the public. They're animals. Animals, I tell you!
ISL 6y ago
Part of the rationale for the ban was that not enough people were using it?
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I haven't read the article yet but if true it logically makes a bit of sense- contact tracing apps need a certain critical mass to be effective. Without enough people in a geographic area using it, you are left with a false sense of security, and may inadvertently take riskier behaviors. Of course, it might still be helpful to let you affirmatively knoe you have been exposed, as opposed to trusting that you have not, but that might be asking a lot out of society.
  - dzhiurgis 6y ago
    That's where Google and Apple dropped the ball by not making tracing built into OS itself. Making it optional made it pointless. We've developed actual vaccine than a dinky student grade app. Despicable.
    - toast0 6y ago
      If Google built it into the OS, it might have enough installed users to use it in what 2025?
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      This is because they rightly recognized the backlash they would face if they did build it into the OS. Even if everything proceeded nominally from there, it would have been bad press and privacy complaints for many news cycles. And that's if there were no fuckups and the app worked well. If the public had any appetite for that kind of intervention, I'm sure those companies would have been happy to do it. And for what upside? It's not like you're going to earn additional customers by having the better contact tracing framework. Two ways this could have happened: western citizens could have demanded it loudly and with general concurrence, or western governments could have banded together and ordered it done. Failing those two, it wasn't going to happen. (China, Taiwan and Korea chose the latter route.)
nostromo 6y ago
I'm glad there's growing pushback to these programs. Here in the US we tend to irrevocably lose a bit of independence and freedom in every crisis -- and it's often lost forever. Wars tends to be the best fig leaf for eroding our civil liberties. Things like the Patriot Act get passed after 9/11 and are still with us today. The authorization for war given to Bush in 2001 is still active today, several presidents later, and has been used to kill and torture people in a whole host of countries. Figurative "wars" have resulted in erosion of rights - like the war on drugs - which gave us expanded civil asset forfeiture. Covid-19 has given the governors a pass to do anything they like with little to no oversight. Banning any gathering of people is totally fine apparently. It's also seemingly fine to only use it against gatherings that are opposed to your political objectives, while those that you support are given a pass. Banning the expression of one's religion is also ok. (In my state all places of worship were forced closed, no matter what precautions they took, but vape stores were deemed essential businesses. I'm an atheist but this even bothered me.) Maybe this is all perfect reasonable given the crisis -- but once these newfound powers are let out of the bag, we often find that they're hard to pull back.
- jfoster 6y ago
  Isn't the correct response to that ensuring rollback of the measures once the crisis has passed, rather than resisting commonsense measures during a crisis, though?
  - burnthrow 6y ago
    Yes, exactly why there's a Bureau of Overreach Rollbacks.
  - macinjosh 6y ago
    To my mind exchanging liberty for safety is never common sense.
    - a_t48 6y ago
      If you’re going to use words like “never”, are you fine with the right to punch whoever you like?
intricatedetail 6y ago
These authorities seem to be focusing on low hanging fruit, but don't care about big guys violating privacy left and right. Why is that?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Because the big guys are compliant with the law, by and large. Enormous effort went into complying with gdpr at all the big players.
  - intricatedetail 6y ago
    I don't think so. For example Instagram to this day won't reply to my GDPR requests. I would report them, but don't want to lose my accounts.
cblconfederate 6y ago
thats great to hear. these apps dont work anyway but they are a good excuse to install some authoritarianism through the window
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  At any moment there's 10s of apps tracking your location on your phone. Get over it.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    this is not location
    - dzhiurgis 6y ago
      This is way less important data that never even leaves your device...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
botto 6y ago
So this is article refers to the app developed by a company called Simula which is government owned and does various research in to communications tech and data research. You can find an interesting self Q and A https://www.simula.no/news/digital-contact-tracing-qa https://www.simula.no/news/digital-contact-tracing-qa One of the few smell tests that I wonder if it was a catalyst for the ban is how they explained away not open sourcing the code and using aggregated data to track the spread of the virus. It all lacked technical details which also is a bad smell test for me
botto 6y ago
Some more info from Datatilsynet: https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/temporary-suspension-of-the-norwegian-covid-19-contact-tracing-app/ https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/temporary-suspensio... https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/the-norwegian-data-protection-authority-has-imposed-a-temporary-ban-on-smittestopp-contact-tracing-mobile-application/ https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/the-norwegian-data-...

TLDR: The old COVID-19 contact tracing app was banned in June. "A new app is already being planned" (As of October 24, 2020). "The new app expected to be implemented this year (2020)." Meantime: US CDC has issued "Warning – Level 3, COVID-19 risk in Norway is high". https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/warning/coronavirus-norway https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/warning/coronavirus-nor... "CDC recommends travelers avoid all nonessential international travel to Norway."

holimoer820 6y ago

Does anybody here know if these contact tracing apps can possibly work? Is bluetooth enough to trace reliably?

philliphaydon 6y ago
In Singapore we have QR code’s and every mall/shop/building you must sign in. It works. Every case we know where a person visited and track down other who visited the same places at those times to get them tested. We are at 0 community cases. Anyone who says lockdowns and masks don’t work doesn’t know what they are taking about. The reasons they don’t work is because people won’t take this whole thing seriously.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  > In Singapore we have QR code’s and every mall/shop/building you must sign in. It works. Every case we know where a person visited and track down Good lord. Is it mandatory?
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    Absolutely, and its great. There's alot of people out, business as usual, 100% mask usage. 0 community cases (only import as people return to Singapore, but they are quarantined on arrival) The only countries I would want to be in, is Singapore, Taiwan, or New Zealand. I wouldn't feel save in any other country.
    - johnisgood 6y ago
      Yeah, you got all the tech ready to go and become China's social credit system. People are already using it as it is mandatory. What is stopping the Government actually from doing it more "evil", perhaps in the name of counter-terrorism, saving the children, or something like that. I do not know, it reeks of anti-privacy and it is dystopian to me. There are many ways of convincing people to wear a mask. Regardless, my entire family tested positive. No symptoms.
- toast0 6y ago
  Lockdowns and masks are pretty effective, but being an relatively small island nation with border security seems to be pretty important too.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    Yes, that makes it easier to enforce for sure. But majority of the people here are also willing to do it. No one here feels like their 'rights' are taken away or that the Government made up the virus to suppress the citizens.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- holimoer820 6y ago
  What about JUST bluetooth?

butz 6y ago

Why does every country has to reinvent a wheel by building their own contact tracing apps (and failing in respecting privacy by doing so)? Wasn't there already one app open sourced, and if I'm not mistaken, it was made in EU, so GDPR compliance is guaranteed. Not to mention solutions provided by Google and Apple, but I cannot comment on GDPR compliance for those.

neom 6y ago
NearForm have done a lot of work on this: https://github.com/nearform https://github.com/nearform
Andaith 6y ago
Singapore open-sourced their app, and Australia basically took the code and used it. Haven't really heard much about the app any more. Now it's all QR codes. I don't think the apps work that well with Apple's bluetooth permissions...
- sundvor 6y ago
  Australia then proceeded to bury its use. No references to it any of the updates, for months, never a question until a recent test when they asked if we have the app installed. That they couldn't make it work on iPhone, to have it run in the background, was probably what sealed it. No such issues on Android.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > and Australia basically took the code and used it. Australia basically paid $6million to a contracting company to take the Singapore code and badly reuse it... It was a pork barrelling rort from the start. The one good thing to come out of it was a learned a lot more about how to use Ghidra to reverse Android apks... (I had a great deal of fun, along with a group of other people, seeing just where the .au app differed from the .sg GitHub code...)
snorremd 6y ago
NIPH (Norwegian Institute of Public Health) has contracted Netcompany, the team behind the danish contact tracing app), to build it. https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2020/netcompany-to-develop-app-for-digital-contact-tracing/ https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2020/netcompany-to-develop-app-fo... So they won’t be starting quite from scratch.

supernova87a 6y ago

Seems governments are struggling with the idea of people's personal information being kept private while their germs are spewed all over the public.

burnthrow 6y ago
> their germs are spewed all over the public. They're animals. Animals, I tell you!

ISL 6y ago

Part of the rationale for the ban was that not enough people were using it?

zdragnar 6y ago
I haven't read the article yet but if true it logically makes a bit of sense- contact tracing apps need a certain critical mass to be effective. Without enough people in a geographic area using it, you are left with a false sense of security, and may inadvertently take riskier behaviors. Of course, it might still be helpful to let you affirmatively knoe you have been exposed, as opposed to trusting that you have not, but that might be asking a lot out of society.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  That's where Google and Apple dropped the ball by not making tracing built into OS itself. Making it optional made it pointless. We've developed actual vaccine than a dinky student grade app. Despicable.
  - toast0 6y ago
    If Google built it into the OS, it might have enough installed users to use it in what 2025?
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    This is because they rightly recognized the backlash they would face if they did build it into the OS. Even if everything proceeded nominally from there, it would have been bad press and privacy complaints for many news cycles. And that's if there were no fuckups and the app worked well. If the public had any appetite for that kind of intervention, I'm sure those companies would have been happy to do it. And for what upside? It's not like you're going to earn additional customers by having the better contact tracing framework. Two ways this could have happened: western citizens could have demanded it loudly and with general concurrence, or western governments could have banded together and ordered it done. Failing those two, it wasn't going to happen. (China, Taiwan and Korea chose the latter route.)

nostromo 6y ago

I'm glad there's growing pushback to these programs. Here in the US we tend to irrevocably lose a bit of independence and freedom in every crisis -- and it's often lost forever. Wars tends to be the best fig leaf for eroding our civil liberties. Things like the Patriot Act get passed after 9/11 and are still with us today. The authorization for war given to Bush in 2001 is still active today, several presidents later, and has been used to kill and torture people in a whole host of countries. Figurative "wars" have resulted in erosion of rights - like the war on drugs - which gave us expanded civil asset forfeiture. Covid-19 has given the governors a pass to do anything they like with little to no oversight. Banning any gathering of people is totally fine apparently. It's also seemingly fine to only use it against gatherings that are opposed to your political objectives, while those that you support are given a pass. Banning the expression of one's religion is also ok. (In my state all places of worship were forced closed, no matter what precautions they took, but vape stores were deemed essential businesses. I'm an atheist but this even bothered me.) Maybe this is all perfect reasonable given the crisis -- but once these newfound powers are let out of the bag, we often find that they're hard to pull back.

jfoster 6y ago
Isn't the correct response to that ensuring rollback of the measures once the crisis has passed, rather than resisting commonsense measures during a crisis, though?
- burnthrow 6y ago
  Yes, exactly why there's a Bureau of Overreach Rollbacks.
- macinjosh 6y ago
  To my mind exchanging liberty for safety is never common sense.
  - a_t48 6y ago
    If you’re going to use words like “never”, are you fine with the right to punch whoever you like?

intricatedetail 6y ago

These authorities seem to be focusing on low hanging fruit, but don't care about big guys violating privacy left and right. Why is that?

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Because the big guys are compliant with the law, by and large. Enormous effort went into complying with gdpr at all the big players.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  I don't think so. For example Instagram to this day won't reply to my GDPR requests. I would report them, but don't want to lose my accounts.

cblconfederate 6y ago

thats great to hear. these apps dont work anyway but they are a good excuse to install some authoritarianism through the window

dzhiurgis 6y ago
At any moment there's 10s of apps tracking your location on your phone. Get over it.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  this is not location
  - dzhiurgis 6y ago
    This is way less important data that never even leaves your device...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

botto 6y ago

So this is article refers to the app developed by a company called Simula which is government owned and does various research in to communications tech and data research. You can find an interesting self Q and A https://www.simula.no/news/digital-contact-tracing-qa https://www.simula.no/news/digital-contact-tracing-qa One of the few smell tests that I wonder if it was a catalyst for the ban is how they explained away not open sourcing the code and using aggregated data to track the spread of the virus. It all lacked technical details which also is a bad smell test for me

botto 6y ago

Some more info from Datatilsynet: https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/temporary-suspension-of-the-norwegian-covid-19-contact-tracing-app/ https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/temporary-suspensio... https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/the-norwegian-data-protection-authority-has-imposed-a-temporary-ban-on-smittestopp-contact-tracing-mobile-application/ https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/news/2020/the-norwegian-data-...