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The last entity in the world I would want to trust with all of my location data is google.

• robrenaud 5y ago
  Which is why Apple/Google engineered this to not use GPS location data, instead each phone locally kept track of nearby bluetooth IDs. Which made the app scale quadratically rather than linearly with usage (10% adoption means 1% of possible transmissions caught), which made it basically useless without large scale adoption that it never got. Google/Apple timidly did some basically useless engineering, when they could have instead made a significant dent in limiting the spread of covid. If they were going to make the timid, quadratically scaling decision, they should have boldly made it opt out. A quadratic scaling, privacy preserving protocol plus a timid opt in strategy might have cost 30k lives if it ubiquitous/automatic contact tracing would have stopped 10% of the spread.
  • jedimastert 5y ago
    > Google/Apple timidly did some basically useless engineering, when they could have instead made a significant dent in limiting the spread of covid. Are out suggesting they actually should have used GPS data instead? Can you imagine the kind of holy hell that would have brought on them? > If they were going to make the timid, quadratically scaling decision, they should have boldly made it opt out I think the biggest problem is that hospitals and regions had to have their own databases for the ids