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> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out. If Google or Apple remotely installed a ha
by hparadiz 6y ago
> BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.
If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.
- azinman2 6y agoExcept it wasn’t hastily built, and the tracking isn’t controlled by a gov agency in the nefarious way that you’re implying.
- hparadiz 6y agoI've seen all sorts of solutions put together by municipalities big and small from counties to states to countries and everything in between during this whole Covid thing and the thing that struck me is how easy it was for them to essentially track you with perfect precision and tie it back to a phone number. > Except it wasn’t hastily built They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight. > nefarious way that you’re implying I didn't imply any nefarious intent what so over. All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it. Who has this data? No idea. How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. Does it draw more energy on my device or use more processing power? No idea. That alone is enough to not use it.
- azinman2 6y agoWhen you say Apple or Google installed, I assume you’re talking about exposure notifications that they built. I work at Apple and witnessed it. Nothing about it was slapdash and privacy was #1. In this system, it’s not easy at all for government agencies to track you. That was very explicitly part of the design, as is shown in all the public docs. It’s not like how it works is a secret [1]. Your location isn’t being tracked and put into a database. Nothing about exposure notifications uses location. [1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing
- hparadiz 6y agoHere's one example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.alohasafe.alert https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.alohasafe.... No idea if it's using the official API or what. I honestly just don't believe that it can work well enough in some places. Especially here in Hawaii where gatherings are on a beach and people leave their cellphones in their car or backpacks or whatever. I was even recently at a camp where people were sharing a blunt and there wasn't a single phone in sight cause it was out of signal range. Could have easily been a super spreader event and the tech solution would have failed.
- burke 6y agoWhat are you even trying to draw attention to here? This appears to be using the EN framework, which suggests it wouldn't have been approved for distribution if it collected any personal data or location information. I get that you have an axe to grind here for some reason but I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make.
- azinman2 6y agoExactly. It's not like Exposure Notifications are meant to solve every single spreading case out there -- many people aren't even opting into it. But we need all the help we can get, so why not chip away at the problem?
- hparadiz 6y agoI have no axe to grind at all. I'm just saying why I personally don't use it. I don't really have an opinion one way or the other. Please don't be so angry with me.
- sleepybrett 6y agoWhat you are 'just saying' is FUD. You don't know how the system works yet you keep coming back to this thread to defend your incorrect assumptions.
- deleted 5y ago
- lrem 6y agoAnd this is exactly why the apps failed: even HN readers don't know how they work.
- azinman2 6y agoAnd that's really a shame. It has the power to make an even larger dent in the epidemic. This is the cult of ignorance at play, where mistrust of all institutions (heavily fueled by need to get clicks to serve ads) means we can't have nice things.
- Lammy 6y agoI’m not ignorant just because I don’t want to be tracked, and slinging insults like this just reaffirms my beliefs :)
- brewdad 6y agoYou are ignorant though. The whole point of EN is that you CAN'T be tracked.
- Lammy 5y agoYeah, that’s the claim, but it conveniently ignores all the metadata that ties a particular device to certain places/times/events based on the other rotating IDs they’ve seen. It’s like Nintendo 3DS StreetPass but bad.
- lrem 5y agoHow do you ensure you're not tracked? That your location history is not sold to every bidder?
- azinman2 6y agoIt's not an insult directed at a single person. I'm echoing Isaac Asimov's critique of American culture: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
- nemothekid 6y agoIt isn't fair to claim they were built with (1) no oversight, (2) hastily, and (3) out of plain view when you haven't even looked into how it works. AFAIK none of the implementations use location data.
- burke 6y agoIn fact, Apple and Google won't accept apps that use both exposure notification and location APIs.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoYour choice to be ignorant about the contact tracing frameworks is your own, but please stop spreading misinformation: https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/#exposure-notifications-and-privacy https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/#exposu... There were many locations who built their own apps that did not follow this privacy model, or used it incorrectly, but for most cases "your location data being put into some database" is not accurate.
- hparadiz 6y ago> There were many locations who built their own apps that did not follow this privacy model, or used it incorrectly We agree then.
- simonh 6y agoNo we don't, because the systems you actually specified are known for a fact not to do the things you alleged that they do.
- azinman2 6y agoYou mentioned Apple & Google remotely installing something, so the only logical conclusion is that you're talking about Exposure Notifications (which btw are opt-in, not opt-out, so remotely installed is a mischaracterization here). If someone built their own solution and put it on the app store, then it doesn't really have much to do at all with Apple or Google outside of being distributed on their platforms, and certainly would never be remotely installed (at least on Apple platforms... I have no idea what Oppo might do in China for example, but whatever they'd be doing would likely be because some country law dictated it).
- Lammy 6y agoThere is no amount of mental gymnastics you can do to turn “app that tracks when yours and other phones are together and does <something> about it” into something that is inside my moral boundaries.
- 6y ago
- burke 6y ago> All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it. This is patently wrong. Exposure Notification apps (those using the official APIs, anyway) have no access to location APIs. The absolute worst they could possibly do is to log your IP address when you reach out for new data, but this is also true of every app you use, and every website you visit. You don't really seem interested in understanding how they actually work, but if anyone else cares, https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ is a pretty reasonable explanation.
- mschuster91 6y ago> They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight. The amount of data that the Covid tracking API of Android and iOS makes available is precisely known. Germany's and a few other (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/reusable-code-covid-19-apps https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...) are open source. > Who has this data? No idea. The users on their individual devices. > How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. It will be all but useless. Except if you're in Singapore. Their tracing app morphed into a spy software for law enforcement: https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1384566617330229250 https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1384566617330229250
- ViViDboarder 6y agoI’m assuming you didn’t read the white paper or anything about the implementation. No location tracking is happening.
- sys_64738 5y agoYou’re assumption about that and the full software implementation might be far apart. You can’t trust anybody with stuff like this as it will always be misused and abused until the perps are caught. The value of source code access is honesty.
- ViViDboarder 5y agoIf you have an iPhone and don’t trust Apple, you’re already compromised. Why would they wait for AirTags or Exposure Notifications to track your location when their entire OS is a black box? That just doesn’t make sense to me.
- jwalton 6y agoThe Canadian version of the app recently added “secure anonymous usage statistics”, which aren’t particularly anonymous (since all we have is their word that they don’t log your IP), and that aren’t particu secure (messages are encrypted with HTTPS but it’s not too difficult to infer the contents of the message based on their length). And, you can’t opt out of them. I still have it on my phone (although at least within my house I’m blocking their metrics via pinhole) but I 100% understand why someone would not want it on their phone.
- azinman2 6y agoAFAIK they don't gain access to the BLE contact database on your phone, so what exactly is it that they could be transmitting of concern? What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
- jwalton 5y agoThey're transmitting things like "This device showed a 'You have been exposed to COVID' alert". You can see the full list of events they send here: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app/blob/97bb1603414043f85b6843e17f8170cbd48452b9/src/services/MetricsService/MetricsFilter.ts#L9-L18 https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app/blob/97bb16034140... But the fact that they could be tracking which citizens have and have not been shown a "You have been exposed to Covid" alert, and there's no way to opt-out, is a little scary. > What are you able to infer about the contents exactly? Most days, you are not exposed to covid and you don't interact with the app. So most days, the app transmits a "background-check" event to the server. This means the contents of the message will be the exact same length every day. As a passive listener, then, you can watch for days where the length of the message is abnormal, and then because there's only so many different kinds of messages that the app sends and they all have unique lengths, you can infer what metrics events must have been sent to the server based on the delta of the message lengths. You can figure out if a user has been shown a "You have been exposed to COVID" based purely on passive listening to traffic from the device.
- luxuryballs 6y agobut it could be used to essentially manipulate you to stay at home if someone went around town and then told the app that they have covid, which is nefarious enough
- swiley 6y agoUnless you're using a pinephone they already have. And even then the default OS on the newer pinephones uses KDE as a DE which had telemetry built in at one point.
- titzer 6y agoI hope you don't use Google Play Services, because you really don't want to know what it does.
- djrogers 6y agoExcept that’s not what the exposure notification APIs did at all. Location is never tracked or transmitted to anyone. What exactly would you have been concerned about?
- Lammy 6y agoIt is literally impossible to submit any exposure alert without including location data, and then it can reasonably be assumed that all the matched bluetooth device IDs were within the same general vicinity as well. Have you ever used a GeoIP database?
- dbbk 6y agoYou clearly don't understand how the system works, there is no data related to location involved.
- Lammy 6y agoYou clearly don’t understand my point. It becomes location data as soon as it’s triggered.
- dbbk 5y agoIt doesn’t. I don’t know what to tell you. You should go back and re-read how it works.
- Lammy 5y agoSure, let’s see: https://www.blog.google/documents/57/Overview_of_COVID-19_Contact_Tracing_Using_BLE.pdf https://www.blog.google/documents/57/Overview_of_COVID-19_Co... Right away I notice the glaring omission of “the surveillance state” in the wording of certain sentences like “People who test positive are not identified to other users, Google or Apple“. “With Bob’s consent, his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys for his broadcast beacons to the cloud”, also giving away his geolocation in the process. My read of the “doesn’t collect location data” is “doesn’t explicitly collect location data”, like just because it doesn’t send a field ‘geolocation’ they can technically say that and not be lying. You should check out one of my very favorite blog posts of all time: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- sneak 6y agoI would be miffed about it for the thirty minutes it takes me to find the nearest body of water.