4 ms·
You'll be tracked, it'll just be worse and not in a way that protects your privacy. You'll also be generally ignored by people that care about solving these pr
by fossuser 5y ago
You'll be tracked, it'll just be worse and not in a way that protects your privacy.
You'll also be generally ignored by people that care about solving these problems.
You'll also make it harder for people that care about the distinction between pragmatic solutions that protect privacy and simple solutions that don't.
When your response to both is the same the response from governments is: "the privacy people are going to complain no matter what, so just ignore them".
Your comment is basically an example of the kind of misleading knee-jerk response I was talking about. The bluetooth alerting design is not tracking, but your response to it is more likely to lead to solutions that are.
Clever technological solutions can allow us to preserve privacy and still do important hard things. The bluetooth exposure notification design is an example of that, people that care about privacy should be excited about it.
- Lammy 5y agoYou’re totally ignoring my point. I’m not talking about the tech. It affects the way people in general will think about having tech track them.
- fossuser 5y agoI understand it, I just don't find it compelling. Second order effect arguments are often weak, in this case - not using a cleverly designed system that doesn't track them because it could make some theoretical person more comfortable with the idea of tracking in general doesn't hold up to me. The point of this is that it doesn't track them, but still achieves the goal of exposure notifications. It's like the seat-belts are worse argument - if people wear seatbelts they'll drive more dangerously therefore seatbelts are bad. These type of second order arguments can sound contrarian or smart, but they rarely hold up to scrutiny. (Similarly masks are bad because they make people touch their face or w/e nonsense was pushed early on in the pandemic). The average person is tracked completely by modern web companies, telcos, and random apps and they give up that willingly already - how does privacy preserving contact tracing make that worse? I don't buy it. It's more likely using services that preserve privacy by design get people to understand why they're different than everything else, and why that's valuable. When you dismiss them along with the bad ones you make it harder for people to make that distinction.
- warkdarrior 5y agoYour point of view will drive the deployment of fully passive tracking, where you have absolutely no say in how/when/which data is collected. Things like pervasive cameras, cell tower dumps, etc., will become the norm whether you want it or not, but with the added downside that you have not say in it.
- throwaway3699 5y agoWe are back to the cookies argument. Keep them because at least users are in control, lest fingerprinting becomes the norm.