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It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. The installation of this app, even done wit

It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. The installation of this app, even done with good intent, open a lot of questions on what should be possible or not to be done by government and corporations. When you get a device with pre-installed, uninstallable, or auto-installed apps. What are the rules? > "By enabling this service, you can be quickly notified if you’ve likely been exposed to the virus by another MassNotify user, allowing you to reduce risk to your loved ones, seek medical attention, and slow the spread in your community." In this case it seems that the same goal could have been better achieved by SMS that do not depend on the brand of your phone. The dependency on proprietary app stores and OSs seems a risk for the continuation of a free and reliable communications. The only thing that is impossible to achieve without an app is to allow the user to select contacts to whom send a notification. Corporations like Google, and Apple know the list of all your contacts. So, it seems that the intention of the app is to reduce friction and send notifications as easy and effortlessly as possible to avoid that procrastination causes people to delay the warning. But, instead of the silent install the government could have spend money in advertisement campaigns to assure a correct amount of installations. It costs money, but, people pay taxes so the government can engage on this type of initiative at a scale. This could have been a very good alternative, even if it means increasing the budged. Medical emergencies are worth the investing.

dagi3d 5y ago
> In this case it seems that the same goal could have been better achieved by SMS that do not depend on the brand of your phone. The dependency on proprietary app stores and OSs seems a risk for the continuation of a free and reliable communications. While installing an app without users consent can be as questionable as you want, the point about these apps are not the notifications itself but about the contact tracing which is achieved through the bluetooth functionality. also, sending sms messages has other privacy concerns that the tracing apps have tried to avoid from the very beginning. having a person phone number can lead to eventually identify that person while that internal trace id it might use, won't.
- esyir 5y ago
  This sounds worse to me? Rather than violation of a relatively small privacy (phone number), you instead get timestamp social graph interactions in the physical world. This seems like fat more extreme an invasion than the former.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    Read up on how the contact tracing apps work. They do not upload your data to the cloud. Phones broadcast a rolling random identifier, other phones collect received identifiers, and only on confirmed infection does the person's phone upload its last two weeks of broadcast IDs to the cloud, where other phones can grab them and cross-check. Having someone's phone number allows you (via the phone company) to trace their location at any time, forever. That is much worse.
    - thinkingemote 5y ago
      I think the low adoption is because it's hard to explain. No one on my street, none of the most vulnerable people would understand your paragraph. No wonder it's not being adopted by those who should be adopting it, but just being used by vigilant young tech savvy and already covid safe people. So not only are only a small number of people using it, these people are least likely to make a difference using it.
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        Edit: Surely we can come up with a more approachable explanation for less technical folks, though? Here's an attempt: "Contact tracing respects your privacy and does not send your location to the cloud. Instead, your phone makes up a new random name every 15 minutes and broadcasts it to nearby phones. It remembers the last two weeks of names it used, as well as the last two weeks of names it heard from other phones. When someone catches COVID-19, they register it in the app. Their phone then uploads the last two weeks' worth of names it used to the cloud, where other phones can download the data. The names aren't connected to their identity, all they represent is someone who caught COVID-19. If your phone finds a match between a name it has recently heard and the online database, it sends you a notification. After 2 weeks the data is erased, so you are only notified if you were near an infected person in the past 2 weeks. Since the random names change every 15 minutes, nobody can track you or know that you are the same person as last time they saw your phone. The data is only stored locally, so after it is deleted two weeks later, there is no way to go back and recover it." How's that? (Edited because without the intro sentence it sounded like I was trying to imply the parent didn't get it; that wasn't my intent.
chrischattin 5y ago
If you think legislation is the answer, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Who do you think writes the legislation and hands it to X representative? How niave... HN crowd has fallen pretty far. Used to be WE build the things that make our lives better and now the top comment is calling for some ethemeral they to come up with legislation? That’s BS. And, antithetical to any builder/havker ethic. We build the world we want.
- ben_w 5y ago
  That was viable when computers were a tiny part of the world, but not when our power to change things became to great to be ignored. Even back in the day when you could convince a public payphone to work for free by whistling the right way, that kind of interference in a public communications channel was enough for the powers that be to get worried. Now? Now phones are effectively universal, and every government can afford to pay developers to insert obfuscated backdoors in open source code, while the richest could do the same with the hardware from the silicon wafer up to the finished product. And they do, because they want to keep their power. Just as you go to war with the army you have rather than the army you want, if you seek to improve our security and freedom you have to use the political power structures that exist rather than the ones you want to exist.
- sp332 5y ago
  This defeatist attitude toward legislating is self-perpetuating. We can at least hold our representatives accountable.
  - pooper 5y ago
    > This defeatist attitude toward legislating is self-perpetuating. We can at least hold our representatives accountable. What can we do? I have no confidence that Congress will act in my best interest. Congress has some "partisan deadlock" but somehow I feel confident Intel's payday will go through without a bumpy ride > U.S. senators propose 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing (reuters.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27561238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27561238 We can't even get a modest broadband Internet infrastructure bill passed. > Widespread fiber-to-the-home deployment would make a bigger difference for more Internet users than Starlink. President Joe Biden pledged to lower prices and deploy "future-proof" broadband to all Americans, but he's already scaled back his plan in the face of opposition from Republicans and incumbent ISPs. AT&T has been lobbying against nationwide fiber and funding for municipal networks, and AT&T CEO John Stankey expressed confidence last week that Congress will steer legislation in the direction that AT&T favors. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starlink-dish-overheats-in-arizona-sun-knocking-user-offline-for-7-hours/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl... > Biden's pitch to build "future-proof" broadband technology is also facing opposition from broadband providers who don't want to build fiber-to-the-home networks in rural areas. Just before Biden announced his plan, AT&T said it opposes subsidizing fiber-to-the-home deployment across the US, arguing that rural people don't need fiber and should be satisfied with Internet service that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biden-cuts-35b-from-broadband-plan-amid-gop-opposition-deal-still-unlikely/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biden-cuts-35b-f... I have not met a single programmer / computer scientist who seriously defends the CFAA and yet we cannot find the votes in Congress to repeal it.
de6u99er 5y ago
> It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. How about applying common sense?
- oigursh 5y ago
  Common sense is not so common.
  - belter 5y ago
    “Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.” ― René Descartes, Discourse on Method
  - bostik 5y ago
    Common sense is the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. - Albert Einstein [0] 0: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/ yes, this CAN be attributed to him
- askmike 5y ago
  I think covid has shown that when the world is faced with a pandemic, not everyone agrees on what's common sense is in terms of how to respond as a society/government.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  The difficulty of taking a government-sponsored and government-accessible substantial privacy risk (at a minimum) is something that some will find utterly unacceptable and others will think might be concerning or unacceptable in general but is righteously justified in this specific situation. The first group’s common sense says “don’t install”; the second group’s common sense says “install via subterfuge if necessary”.
- themusicgod1 5y ago
  Or how about people just use GNU instead of GAFAM crapware? Turn "silently installing things in the background" off by default and maintain user control over all their hardware. It's not like Richard Stallman hasn't been warning of this sort of thing happening for decades - the GNU project exists for a reason, and we should use their code for general purpose computing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402024
yunohn 5y ago
> instead of the silent install the government could have spend money in advertisement campaigns This absolutely does not work. Here, the NL gov tried this and almost nobody installed the app, despite it using the privacy-safe google/apple API.
- slipframe 5y ago
  If people don't want to install the app, then that should be the end of it. The government's inability to convince people to install the application should not justify the application being installing it anyway. Just the contrary.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- avian 5y ago
  I'm not from NL, but I am someone that did not install the COVID tracing app that our government provided (for voluntary installation). My reason was that I was not convinced by the PR that it is actually privacy safe. Just repeating "it uses a safe API, trust us/Google/Apple" was not enough for me. The subcontractor that made the app did dump some source code on GitHub saying "see, we have nothing to hide". However it was very obviously not the same code as the app published on the Play store (for start, it had a different version number), it had a cleared out commit log, etc. Questions about that went unanswered as far as I know. I try my best to prevent COVID spread, wear a mask, got vaccinated as soon as possible, etc. I think it's more likely that the thing with the app was just developers not wanting to bother too much with things they were not paid for than anything nefarious going on. However it raised enough red flags for me that I was not comfortable installing the app on my phone.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    People here are downvoting you, but you were 100% right to doubt: https://www.iccl.ie/news/serious-privacy-and-data-harvesting-concerns-about-technology-underlying-hse-app/ https://www.iccl.ie/news/serious-privacy-and-data-harvesting... An excerpt: > While Android users can, in theory, opt to turn off Google Play Services, users of the Covid-19 contact-tracing app in Ireland cannot turn the surveillance off if they want the contact-tracing app to work. This means the collection and use of this data is unavoidable for people who wish to use the app. > The data shared includes long-term, unchangeable identifiers of the phone users, including their phone’s IP address, WiFi MAC address, International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, SIM serial number, phone number and Gmail address, as well as fine-grained data from other, potentially sensitive apps, such as banking, dating or health apps. This is data which, when considered together, has the potential to draw a very detailed map of our lives and activities. This story was posted to HN last year, and received a tiny fraction of the upvotes of the story promoting the Irish / Google / Apple app's privacy features. Which would explain why you are downvoted, despite having been proven correct well over a year ago.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
underseacables 5y ago
“ When you get a device with pre-installed, uninstallable, or auto-installed apps.” We’ve never had televisions in the house, but I finally broke down and bought a television so my kids could watch Disney+ on the big TV. The first television I purchased was a Samsung, and it came with these apps that I could not uninstall, did not what, and in fact used storage space that I couldn’t do anything about. I put it back in the box and took it back to the store, and got an LG. Very frustrating experience.
- mavhc 5y ago
  That's why it was cheap. But why care about storage space inside your TV?
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Is that your main concern after reading the post above?
    - mavhc 5y ago
      The post about the TV?
- trulyme 5y ago
  I can relate completely. A bit surprised by the LG though - was it any better wrt. preinstalled crapware?
raxxorrax 5y ago
> It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. It is not a new technology at all. It is the same old one that looks new and shiny, but is complete shit because the software doesn't behave.

dagi3d 5y ago

> In this case it seems that the same goal could have been better achieved by SMS that do not depend on the brand of your phone. The dependency on proprietary app stores and OSs seems a risk for the continuation of a free and reliable communications. While installing an app without users consent can be as questionable as you want, the point about these apps are not the notifications itself but about the contact tracing which is achieved through the bluetooth functionality. also, sending sms messages has other privacy concerns that the tracing apps have tried to avoid from the very beginning. having a person phone number can lead to eventually identify that person while that internal trace id it might use, won't.

esyir 5y ago
This sounds worse to me? Rather than violation of a relatively small privacy (phone number), you instead get timestamp social graph interactions in the physical world. This seems like fat more extreme an invasion than the former.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  Read up on how the contact tracing apps work. They do not upload your data to the cloud. Phones broadcast a rolling random identifier, other phones collect received identifiers, and only on confirmed infection does the person's phone upload its last two weeks of broadcast IDs to the cloud, where other phones can grab them and cross-check. Having someone's phone number allows you (via the phone company) to trace their location at any time, forever. That is much worse.
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    I think the low adoption is because it's hard to explain. No one on my street, none of the most vulnerable people would understand your paragraph. No wonder it's not being adopted by those who should be adopting it, but just being used by vigilant young tech savvy and already covid safe people. So not only are only a small number of people using it, these people are least likely to make a difference using it.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      Edit: Surely we can come up with a more approachable explanation for less technical folks, though? Here's an attempt: "Contact tracing respects your privacy and does not send your location to the cloud. Instead, your phone makes up a new random name every 15 minutes and broadcasts it to nearby phones. It remembers the last two weeks of names it used, as well as the last two weeks of names it heard from other phones. When someone catches COVID-19, they register it in the app. Their phone then uploads the last two weeks' worth of names it used to the cloud, where other phones can download the data. The names aren't connected to their identity, all they represent is someone who caught COVID-19. If your phone finds a match between a name it has recently heard and the online database, it sends you a notification. After 2 weeks the data is erased, so you are only notified if you were near an infected person in the past 2 weeks. Since the random names change every 15 minutes, nobody can track you or know that you are the same person as last time they saw your phone. The data is only stored locally, so after it is deleted two weeks later, there is no way to go back and recover it." How's that? (Edited because without the intro sentence it sounded like I was trying to imply the parent didn't get it; that wasn't my intent.

chrischattin 5y ago

If you think legislation is the answer, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Who do you think writes the legislation and hands it to X representative? How niave... HN crowd has fallen pretty far. Used to be WE build the things that make our lives better and now the top comment is calling for some ethemeral they to come up with legislation? That’s BS. And, antithetical to any builder/havker ethic. We build the world we want.

ben_w 5y ago
That was viable when computers were a tiny part of the world, but not when our power to change things became to great to be ignored. Even back in the day when you could convince a public payphone to work for free by whistling the right way, that kind of interference in a public communications channel was enough for the powers that be to get worried. Now? Now phones are effectively universal, and every government can afford to pay developers to insert obfuscated backdoors in open source code, while the richest could do the same with the hardware from the silicon wafer up to the finished product. And they do, because they want to keep their power. Just as you go to war with the army you have rather than the army you want, if you seek to improve our security and freedom you have to use the political power structures that exist rather than the ones you want to exist.
sp332 5y ago
This defeatist attitude toward legislating is self-perpetuating. We can at least hold our representatives accountable.
- pooper 5y ago
  > This defeatist attitude toward legislating is self-perpetuating. We can at least hold our representatives accountable. What can we do? I have no confidence that Congress will act in my best interest. Congress has some "partisan deadlock" but somehow I feel confident Intel's payday will go through without a bumpy ride > U.S. senators propose 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing (reuters.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27561238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27561238 We can't even get a modest broadband Internet infrastructure bill passed. > Widespread fiber-to-the-home deployment would make a bigger difference for more Internet users than Starlink. President Joe Biden pledged to lower prices and deploy "future-proof" broadband to all Americans, but he's already scaled back his plan in the face of opposition from Republicans and incumbent ISPs. AT&T has been lobbying against nationwide fiber and funding for municipal networks, and AT&T CEO John Stankey expressed confidence last week that Congress will steer legislation in the direction that AT&T favors. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starlink-dish-overheats-in-arizona-sun-knocking-user-offline-for-7-hours/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl... > Biden's pitch to build "future-proof" broadband technology is also facing opposition from broadband providers who don't want to build fiber-to-the-home networks in rural areas. Just before Biden announced his plan, AT&T said it opposes subsidizing fiber-to-the-home deployment across the US, arguing that rural people don't need fiber and should be satisfied with Internet service that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biden-cuts-35b-from-broadband-plan-amid-gop-opposition-deal-still-unlikely/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biden-cuts-35b-f... I have not met a single programmer / computer scientist who seriously defends the CFAA and yet we cannot find the votes in Congress to repeal it.

de6u99er 5y ago

> It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. How about applying common sense?

oigursh 5y ago
Common sense is not so common.
- belter 5y ago
  “Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.” ― René Descartes, Discourse on Method
- bostik 5y ago
  Common sense is the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. - Albert Einstein [0] 0: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/ yes, this CAN be attributed to him
askmike 5y ago
I think covid has shown that when the world is faced with a pandemic, not everyone agrees on what's common sense is in terms of how to respond as a society/government.
sokoloff 5y ago
The difficulty of taking a government-sponsored and government-accessible substantial privacy risk (at a minimum) is something that some will find utterly unacceptable and others will think might be concerning or unacceptable in general but is righteously justified in this specific situation. The first group’s common sense says “don’t install”; the second group’s common sense says “install via subterfuge if necessary”.
themusicgod1 5y ago
Or how about people just use GNU instead of GAFAM crapware? Turn "silently installing things in the background" off by default and maintain user control over all their hardware. It's not like Richard Stallman hasn't been warning of this sort of thing happening for decades - the GNU project exists for a reason, and we should use their code for general purpose computing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402024

yunohn 5y ago

> instead of the silent install the government could have spend money in advertisement campaigns This absolutely does not work. Here, the NL gov tried this and almost nobody installed the app, despite it using the privacy-safe google/apple API.

slipframe 5y ago
If people don't want to install the app, then that should be the end of it. The government's inability to convince people to install the application should not justify the application being installing it anyway. Just the contrary.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
avian 5y ago
I'm not from NL, but I am someone that did not install the COVID tracing app that our government provided (for voluntary installation). My reason was that I was not convinced by the PR that it is actually privacy safe. Just repeating "it uses a safe API, trust us/Google/Apple" was not enough for me. The subcontractor that made the app did dump some source code on GitHub saying "see, we have nothing to hide". However it was very obviously not the same code as the app published on the Play store (for start, it had a different version number), it had a cleared out commit log, etc. Questions about that went unanswered as far as I know. I try my best to prevent COVID spread, wear a mask, got vaccinated as soon as possible, etc. I think it's more likely that the thing with the app was just developers not wanting to bother too much with things they were not paid for than anything nefarious going on. However it raised enough red flags for me that I was not comfortable installing the app on my phone.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  People here are downvoting you, but you were 100% right to doubt: https://www.iccl.ie/news/serious-privacy-and-data-harvesting-concerns-about-technology-underlying-hse-app/ https://www.iccl.ie/news/serious-privacy-and-data-harvesting... An excerpt: > While Android users can, in theory, opt to turn off Google Play Services, users of the Covid-19 contact-tracing app in Ireland cannot turn the surveillance off if they want the contact-tracing app to work. This means the collection and use of this data is unavoidable for people who wish to use the app. > The data shared includes long-term, unchangeable identifiers of the phone users, including their phone’s IP address, WiFi MAC address, International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, SIM serial number, phone number and Gmail address, as well as fine-grained data from other, potentially sensitive apps, such as banking, dating or health apps. This is data which, when considered together, has the potential to draw a very detailed map of our lives and activities. This story was posted to HN last year, and received a tiny fraction of the upvotes of the story promoting the Irish / Google / Apple app's privacy features. Which would explain why you are downvoted, despite having been proven correct well over a year ago.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

underseacables 5y ago

“ When you get a device with pre-installed, uninstallable, or auto-installed apps.” We’ve never had televisions in the house, but I finally broke down and bought a television so my kids could watch Disney+ on the big TV. The first television I purchased was a Samsung, and it came with these apps that I could not uninstall, did not what, and in fact used storage space that I couldn’t do anything about. I put it back in the box and took it back to the store, and got an LG. Very frustrating experience.

mavhc 5y ago
That's why it was cheap. But why care about storage space inside your TV?
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Is that your main concern after reading the post above?
  - mavhc 5y ago
    The post about the TV?
trulyme 5y ago
I can relate completely. A bit surprised by the LG though - was it any better wrt. preinstalled crapware?

raxxorrax 5y ago

> It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. It is not a new technology at all. It is the same old one that looks new and shiny, but is complete shit because the software doesn't behave.