9 ms·

5G and Beyond for Contact Tracing

79 points by andima 5y ago

the-dude 5y ago
Well, I will just note that some people were waiting exactly for this.
- yokaze 5y ago
  Care to elaborate? From your short sentence, I can only guess what you mean, and it is at odds of what I get from the article, which says: > Privacy is a key requirement of any contact tracing systems
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Your social graph = you. There is no privacy or anonymity in any of these schemes if the data is ever sent to a central server.
    - yokaze 5y ago
      That's very general and generally known (at least in this community). How do you see that not addressed in the article? which means are you missing?
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    "T-Mobile has been hacked yet again—but still doesn’t know what was taken" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/t-mobile-has-been-hacked-yet-again-but-still-doesnt-know-what-was-taken/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/t-mobile-has-been-ha...
  - the-dude 5y ago
    There is a certain overlap between anti-vax'ers and 5G-alarmists ( the vaccines contain a chip to track you with 5G! ).
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      There is also a huge group of people who are just very against the loss of rights and privacy, from location tracking to showing your medical data to waiters in restaurants, but the media likes to pack them in with "flat earth 5g=corona lizard bill gates" people.
      - the-dude 5y ago
        If you don't want to be tracked, don't carry a tracking device.
        ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        We actually had a short-lived mandate, that if you wanted to cross into another municipality, you needed a phone with a tracking app on. So yeah... complain about that, and be grouped with the flatearthers.
  - ballenf 5y ago
    Absolutely true that keeping surveillance measures private is key to their successful deployment. Then several years later you can mock the critics by pointing out it's nothing new and they shouldn't be so dramatic.
    - yokaze 5y ago
      Not sure, if you are trolling, but assuming good faith: That's not what privacy means. That's secrecy.
rtz121 5y ago
Yet again, the difference between conspiracy theory and reality is 6-12 months.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  At this point we can assume that anything technologically feasible for surveillance is implemented or pending implementation. There were some suggestions that the push for 5G comes from the desire to improve location tracking which is much better on 5G.
  - kook_throwaway 5y ago
    This has been the conclusion I've been dragged kicking and screaming to over the last couple of years myself. - If it's not FOSS it's spyware - If it's got a camera it's probably going to a datacenter to run facial recognition and/or ALPR or similar - If it requires a login they are modeling your behavior
    - swiley 5y ago
      Wear a mask and/or hat and sunglasses when outside Don't drive Don't carry a cell phone (if you're worried about emergencies, HAM licenses and 2M radios are cheap.) Don't use non-free software Don't use hosted centralized technology from Facebook and Google or similar.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  Nailed it
- swiley 5y ago
  I posted ~8 months ago (albeit on an anonymous forum) that those really stupid 5g conspiracy theories might be a coverup for the privacy implications of 5g (my meta conspiracy theory if you will.)
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
headmelted 5y ago
Covid. 5G. Surveillance. I'm sure this thread will be fine.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
More mass surveillance. Wonderful
dirtyid 5y ago
There's a practical need for technological solution which can mitigate pandemics at scale. We went from historic cordon sanitaires that lasted multiple years to ~12 months for mrna vaccines. Effective contact tracing that enables societies to "live" with the virus while vaccine rollout is logical next step. Of course the chance of system being exploited in societies with the political appetite to actually enforce such a system is high. But IMO it's better for the capability exist somewhere than nowhere, especially when risk for pandemics will only increase with population + development over time.
- choward 5y ago
  You have to be kidding. This strategy of lockdown, wear a mask, contact trace and wait for vaccines clearly isn't working. Are you suggesting that it would work if the government could track our locations better?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    It seems like places that actually did “lockdown, wear a mask, and contact trace” did better. (No place in the US did lock downs as far as I know. Several places in China did. When you’re welding steel together to enforce it, it’s probably a lock down. When you’re politely asking people to try to only go to stores once per day, it’s not a lockdown.)
    - tazjin 5y ago
      Ah, the no true scotsman fallacy. If only we had destroyed our health and economy harder, it would have worked!
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        It was more an expression of frustration that what we did in the US was economically, psychologically, and socially destructive while not maximizing the possible benefit. I don’t know if the hill on the right or the one on the left had a higher peak, but it sure does seem like we managed to wade through the river in the valley in the middle. “Don’t let some businesses be open, but let some of their competitors stay open, wear a T-shirt over your mouth, and gather in groups of not more than six before dispersing to forage for food in the supermarkets as often as you like.” How could that possibly fail to contain a contagious disease?
perihelions 5y ago
Librem/Pinephone's killer feature is going to be the baseband modem kill-switch. It's going to be the only way to opt out of this category of tracking.
- swiley 5y ago
  IMO: The real killer feature is the stuff Pine64 is doing with lorawan plus the phone's expansion bus.
- andrey_utkin 5y ago
  I imagine people caring about that could be shopping specifically for (any) pre-5G phones and networks. Might have an effect of holding up the deprecation of 4G as the first mover network will be economically punished.
  - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
    > Might have an effect I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that really care about this and won't just get the latest iphone/Android they can afford once their old phone's screen is too cracked and the battery too aged.
- 3princip 5y ago
  It's more practical at this point to start weaning off carrying a phone at all times. Not necessarily going off grid into the woods, just not carrying it unless you'll need it for something specific that day. I'm not sure more tech is going to solve this issue, we're just digging the hole deeper.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    would the easiest thing just be a foil lined "wallet" for your phone? No signal getting in or out of a faraday cage.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
thombles 5y ago
> We argue that privacy enhancement technologies, albeit highly advisable, might not be strictly necessary, in front of the recent push of operators to enforce privacy via organizational measures. The cynic in me says this is true - not because this is anywhere near sufficient to allay the concerns of privacy advocates, but because it will allay the concerns of legislators and most people who are subject to it won't know the difference.
- swiley 5y ago
  T-Mobile has been doing a fantastic job. No need to think through privacy issues or use open and trust-less technologies, just let the administrators handle it.
aww_dang 5y ago
Are satellite phones an option for privacy?
- petre 5y ago
  I think those can be used to track you even easier. Always remember that Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed with a laser guided missile fired from a Su-25 while he was using a sat phone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev I think the only safe option is E2E encrypted VoIP to a mobile phone used as a relay.
vlan0 5y ago
To get the most accurate data, pervasive mmWave would be needed. Which isn't about to be a reality anytime soon. mmWave deployment proposals have hit my desk from the big US carriers. All in include fiber/microwave backhaul throughout the campus. And that wouldn't even provide full coverage. Pervasive mmWave coverage starts to looks similar in size to 802.11 deployments. Between that and 5G sharing unlicensed spectrum with WiFi6E, it was a hard pass for us.
NonContro 5y ago
If you examine ancient (ie. 'pre-COVID') CDC documents for recommended responses to influenza Categories, based on the global CFR of 0.66 COVID is classed a 'category 3' influenza variant. Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mitigation-sm.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit... It was voluntary isolation of the sick, 'consider' shutting down of schools but only for 4 weeks or less, and to 'consider' social distancing - based only on the age profile of virus deaths. We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response. You'll also note that in this document, there is zero mention of contact tracing. Its basically impossible and fruitless for a respiratory virus. Attempting contact tracing is really just about pushing acceptance of general location tracking onto the population.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Impossible and fruitless? Contact tracing has been quite effective in Taiwan unless I’ve been completely fooled by propaganda. And contact tracing apps don’t require you to accept general location tracking. They anonymously exchange temporary tokens and, when you report yourself as a positive case, the tokens you’ve used in the past two weeks get uploaded to a central authority so that anyone who has received them can see that they represent contact with an infected person.
  - tyfon 5y ago
    Testing, (manual) contact tracing and isolation is imho the biggest preventive measures that have been taken here in Norway. They do struggle in big outbreaks though to map everything but all in all it seems to have worked. Now we are at at 1/10th of the deaths of our neighbour by population.
  - monksy 5y ago
    Let's not forget about S Korea, they've even labeled some of the bigger outbreaks and identified where and how they've happened.
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  The document is from 2007. It doesn’t talk about contact tracing because phones were still using rotary dials at the time. It does mention, for example, quarantines for family members and work colleagues, which is just contact tracing by another name. Contact tracing, as currently implemented in iOS and Android, does not reveal location data to third parties. There are many widespread uses of location data that are far worse for privacy. For contact tracing to be useful, you need to: - believe in the germ theory of disease - believe in the ability to trace contacts at any level than pure randomness These requirements are so low, it makes contact tracing at least theoretically useful at a level close to a tautology. I find your document quite interesting in that it seems to recommend a lot of measures that we are using now.
eplanit 5y ago
I can't trust the authors when they start with a false premise: "The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly raised the need for technological solutions capable to trace contacts of people and provide location-based analytics". No, it has not created any such "need". "It's for yours and _everyone's_ health" is the most common premise used to reduce privacy and increase control over people. No!
- newbamboo 5y ago
  Yes. There is a demonstrable lack of need. Contact tracing has not worked and will not work for covid. As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true. The best measures against covid appear to be old fashioned common sense practices. Pay attention to yourself and if you’re sick stay home. Don’t cough, sneeze or breath on each other unnecessarily. Stand a bit further apart. Be outdoors more.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Even if it worked, it would be trading too much. We already accepted destroying conviviality, limiting freedom of movement and taking a vaccine that has been fast tracked. At this point, I think I've done my part in concessions, especially in regards to following the directives of people and groups that have shown not to be trusted multiple times in the past and have been spreading so many contradictory messages in the last 2 years. So no, officially accepting global tracking, in addition to the secret and scandalous one, is a no-go.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    > As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true. I thought opposite. Contact tracing should work well for strongly spreading (without much contacting) variant because it just trace nearby user rather than "contact".
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      faster spread will lower the signal-to-noise ratio and put too much restrictions on scociety. uk already had to dial back it's contact tracing sesitivity.
macawfish 5y ago
There have been dozens papers like this for years spelling out exactly just what 5G is good for. It should be understood that there are papers about how to do both device free localization and identification with mm wave antenna arrays. Some of these papers explicitly mention that their methods are compatible with off the shelf 5G hardware. From a marketing and business perspective, what do you think "edge computing" is all about? What do you think "internet of things" is really about? "Smart cities"? These slogans are all but bold faced exclamations of what was intended by technologies like this. Where I live, last summer during the protests, the first place 5G towers was in the areas the protests were happening, in the midst of the protests. Why? Why did protestors in Hong Kong decide to cut them down? Why are the five eyes countries so concerned about the security risks of Huawei 5G hardware?
theonlybutlet 5y ago
A solution in search of a problem? Ah cool lets call for social credits or something just cause it gets to use cool tech...
ABoredBirb 5y ago
Longtime HN lurker here, finally something I can chime in on, as I was involved with the development of the Covid19 tracing app for my country. > limited deployment – any technology requires a sufficiently high number of users; Sure, yes, that's true for anything. > security and privacy concerns – many weaknesses and privacy leakages are documented I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API. > lack of reliability – BLE-based apps are prone to errors due to the usage of signal-strength measure- ments to infer contacts; We did extensive testing and the only issues we found was that BLE couldn't tell distance very accurately, but still, we could, with high enough confidence, tell that two phones were within 5m of each other or so. There was also the issue of BLE signal going through walls, which meant you might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case. > data governance – there exists a double standard in governing users’ location data, with fine-grained tracking of device location available only to private companies such as Google or Apple Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data, only proximity data and even that is only stored on the users device and never transmitted elsewhere. GApple covid19 tracing api is based on the DP-3T tracing protocol, the (very human readable) whitepaper of which can be read here: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%20Paper.pdf https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%... There was a lot of disinformation regarding contact tracing apps, both from tin-foil hat wearers, incompetent (or maybe corrupt?) state officials as well as competing, centralized (and actually privacy-breaching) solutions. I can still see a lot of this going around.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  > I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API. data leaks in the api itself will come to light, rest assured. but as you said, the problems with everyting besides the vendor-api have already caused a lot of privacy havoc. > ou might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case. in a literal sense; yes :D but let me assure you that ppl putting their phone near a wall is absolutely not uncommon. > Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data again you seem to willfully misconstrue the allegation. let me tell you that just because the tracing app itself does not have precise location data, the problem of creating yet another record on your phone, attesting your behaviour, is not going away. i take it you are not (yet?) critical of privacy implications of your $dayjob, but try to respect the concerns of ppl that are unilaterly affected by them.

79 points by andima 5y ago

the-dude 5y ago

Well, I will just note that some people were waiting exactly for this.

yokaze 5y ago
Care to elaborate? From your short sentence, I can only guess what you mean, and it is at odds of what I get from the article, which says: > Privacy is a key requirement of any contact tracing systems
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Your social graph = you. There is no privacy or anonymity in any of these schemes if the data is ever sent to a central server.
  - yokaze 5y ago
    That's very general and generally known (at least in this community). How do you see that not addressed in the article? which means are you missing?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  "T-Mobile has been hacked yet again—but still doesn’t know what was taken" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/t-mobile-has-been-hacked-yet-again-but-still-doesnt-know-what-was-taken/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/t-mobile-has-been-ha...
- the-dude 5y ago
  There is a certain overlap between anti-vax'ers and 5G-alarmists ( the vaccines contain a chip to track you with 5G! ).
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    There is also a huge group of people who are just very against the loss of rights and privacy, from location tracking to showing your medical data to waiters in restaurants, but the media likes to pack them in with "flat earth 5g=corona lizard bill gates" people.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      If you don't want to be tracked, don't carry a tracking device.
      - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        We actually had a short-lived mandate, that if you wanted to cross into another municipality, you needed a phone with a tracking app on. So yeah... complain about that, and be grouped with the flatearthers.
- ballenf 5y ago
  Absolutely true that keeping surveillance measures private is key to their successful deployment. Then several years later you can mock the critics by pointing out it's nothing new and they shouldn't be so dramatic.
  - yokaze 5y ago
    Not sure, if you are trolling, but assuming good faith: That's not what privacy means. That's secrecy.

rtz121 5y ago

Yet again, the difference between conspiracy theory and reality is 6-12 months.

mrtksn 5y ago
At this point we can assume that anything technologically feasible for surveillance is implemented or pending implementation. There were some suggestions that the push for 5G comes from the desire to improve location tracking which is much better on 5G.
- kook_throwaway 5y ago
  This has been the conclusion I've been dragged kicking and screaming to over the last couple of years myself. - If it's not FOSS it's spyware - If it's got a camera it's probably going to a datacenter to run facial recognition and/or ALPR or similar - If it requires a login they are modeling your behavior
  - swiley 5y ago
    Wear a mask and/or hat and sunglasses when outside Don't drive Don't carry a cell phone (if you're worried about emergencies, HAM licenses and 2M radios are cheap.) Don't use non-free software Don't use hosted centralized technology from Facebook and Google or similar.
imwillofficial 5y ago
Nailed it
swiley 5y ago
I posted ~8 months ago (albeit on an anonymous forum) that those really stupid 5g conspiracy theories might be a coverup for the privacy implications of 5g (my meta conspiracy theory if you will.)
- jazzyjackson 5y ago

headmelted 5y ago

Covid. 5G. Surveillance. I'm sure this thread will be fine.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

More mass surveillance. Wonderful

dirtyid 5y ago

There's a practical need for technological solution which can mitigate pandemics at scale. We went from historic cordon sanitaires that lasted multiple years to ~12 months for mrna vaccines. Effective contact tracing that enables societies to "live" with the virus while vaccine rollout is logical next step. Of course the chance of system being exploited in societies with the political appetite to actually enforce such a system is high. But IMO it's better for the capability exist somewhere than nowhere, especially when risk for pandemics will only increase with population + development over time.

choward 5y ago
You have to be kidding. This strategy of lockdown, wear a mask, contact trace and wait for vaccines clearly isn't working. Are you suggesting that it would work if the government could track our locations better?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It seems like places that actually did “lockdown, wear a mask, and contact trace” did better. (No place in the US did lock downs as far as I know. Several places in China did. When you’re welding steel together to enforce it, it’s probably a lock down. When you’re politely asking people to try to only go to stores once per day, it’s not a lockdown.)
  - tazjin 5y ago
    Ah, the no true scotsman fallacy. If only we had destroyed our health and economy harder, it would have worked!
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      It was more an expression of frustration that what we did in the US was economically, psychologically, and socially destructive while not maximizing the possible benefit. I don’t know if the hill on the right or the one on the left had a higher peak, but it sure does seem like we managed to wade through the river in the valley in the middle. “Don’t let some businesses be open, but let some of their competitors stay open, wear a T-shirt over your mouth, and gather in groups of not more than six before dispersing to forage for food in the supermarkets as often as you like.” How could that possibly fail to contain a contagious disease?

perihelions 5y ago

Librem/Pinephone's killer feature is going to be the baseband modem kill-switch. It's going to be the only way to opt out of this category of tracking.

swiley 5y ago
IMO: The real killer feature is the stuff Pine64 is doing with lorawan plus the phone's expansion bus.
andrey_utkin 5y ago
I imagine people caring about that could be shopping specifically for (any) pre-5G phones and networks. Might have an effect of holding up the deprecation of 4G as the first mover network will be economically punished.
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  > Might have an effect I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that really care about this and won't just get the latest iphone/Android they can afford once their old phone's screen is too cracked and the battery too aged.
3princip 5y ago
It's more practical at this point to start weaning off carrying a phone at all times. Not necessarily going off grid into the woods, just not carrying it unless you'll need it for something specific that day. I'm not sure more tech is going to solve this issue, we're just digging the hole deeper.
- chasd00 5y ago
  would the easiest thing just be a foil lined "wallet" for your phone? No signal getting in or out of a faraday cage.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

thombles 5y ago

> We argue that privacy enhancement technologies, albeit highly advisable, might not be strictly necessary, in front of the recent push of operators to enforce privacy via organizational measures. The cynic in me says this is true - not because this is anywhere near sufficient to allay the concerns of privacy advocates, but because it will allay the concerns of legislators and most people who are subject to it won't know the difference.

swiley 5y ago
T-Mobile has been doing a fantastic job. No need to think through privacy issues or use open and trust-less technologies, just let the administrators handle it.

aww_dang 5y ago

Are satellite phones an option for privacy?

petre 5y ago
I think those can be used to track you even easier. Always remember that Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed with a laser guided missile fired from a Su-25 while he was using a sat phone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev I think the only safe option is E2E encrypted VoIP to a mobile phone used as a relay.

vlan0 5y ago

To get the most accurate data, pervasive mmWave would be needed. Which isn't about to be a reality anytime soon. mmWave deployment proposals have hit my desk from the big US carriers. All in include fiber/microwave backhaul throughout the campus. And that wouldn't even provide full coverage. Pervasive mmWave coverage starts to looks similar in size to 802.11 deployments. Between that and 5G sharing unlicensed spectrum with WiFi6E, it was a hard pass for us.

NonContro 5y ago

If you examine ancient (ie. 'pre-COVID') CDC documents for recommended responses to influenza Categories, based on the global CFR of 0.66 COVID is classed a 'category 3' influenza variant. Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mitigation-sm.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit... It was voluntary isolation of the sick, 'consider' shutting down of schools but only for 4 weeks or less, and to 'consider' social distancing - based only on the age profile of virus deaths. We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response. You'll also note that in this document, there is zero mention of contact tracing. Its basically impossible and fruitless for a respiratory virus. Attempting contact tracing is really just about pushing acceptance of general location tracking onto the population.

eloisius 5y ago
Impossible and fruitless? Contact tracing has been quite effective in Taiwan unless I’ve been completely fooled by propaganda. And contact tracing apps don’t require you to accept general location tracking. They anonymously exchange temporary tokens and, when you report yourself as a positive case, the tokens you’ve used in the past two weeks get uploaded to a central authority so that anyone who has received them can see that they represent contact with an infected person.
- tyfon 5y ago
  Testing, (manual) contact tracing and isolation is imho the biggest preventive measures that have been taken here in Norway. They do struggle in big outbreaks though to map everything but all in all it seems to have worked. Now we are at at 1/10th of the deaths of our neighbour by population.
- monksy 5y ago
  Let's not forget about S Korea, they've even labeled some of the bigger outbreaks and identified where and how they've happened.
IAmEveryone 5y ago
The document is from 2007. It doesn’t talk about contact tracing because phones were still using rotary dials at the time. It does mention, for example, quarantines for family members and work colleagues, which is just contact tracing by another name. Contact tracing, as currently implemented in iOS and Android, does not reveal location data to third parties. There are many widespread uses of location data that are far worse for privacy. For contact tracing to be useful, you need to: - believe in the germ theory of disease - believe in the ability to trace contacts at any level than pure randomness These requirements are so low, it makes contact tracing at least theoretically useful at a level close to a tautology. I find your document quite interesting in that it seems to recommend a lot of measures that we are using now.

eplanit 5y ago

I can't trust the authors when they start with a false premise: "The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly raised the need for technological solutions capable to trace contacts of people and provide location-based analytics". No, it has not created any such "need". "It's for yours and _everyone's_ health" is the most common premise used to reduce privacy and increase control over people. No!

newbamboo 5y ago
Yes. There is a demonstrable lack of need. Contact tracing has not worked and will not work for covid. As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true. The best measures against covid appear to be old fashioned common sense practices. Pay attention to yourself and if you’re sick stay home. Don’t cough, sneeze or breath on each other unnecessarily. Stand a bit further apart. Be outdoors more.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Even if it worked, it would be trading too much. We already accepted destroying conviviality, limiting freedom of movement and taking a vaccine that has been fast tracked. At this point, I think I've done my part in concessions, especially in regards to following the directives of people and groups that have shown not to be trusted multiple times in the past and have been spreading so many contradictory messages in the last 2 years. So no, officially accepting global tracking, in addition to the secret and scandalous one, is a no-go.
- fomine3 5y ago
  > As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true. I thought opposite. Contact tracing should work well for strongly spreading (without much contacting) variant because it just trace nearby user rather than "contact".
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    faster spread will lower the signal-to-noise ratio and put too much restrictions on scociety. uk already had to dial back it's contact tracing sesitivity.

macawfish 5y ago

There have been dozens papers like this for years spelling out exactly just what 5G is good for. It should be understood that there are papers about how to do both device free localization and identification with mm wave antenna arrays. Some of these papers explicitly mention that their methods are compatible with off the shelf 5G hardware. From a marketing and business perspective, what do you think "edge computing" is all about? What do you think "internet of things" is really about? "Smart cities"? These slogans are all but bold faced exclamations of what was intended by technologies like this. Where I live, last summer during the protests, the first place 5G towers was in the areas the protests were happening, in the midst of the protests. Why? Why did protestors in Hong Kong decide to cut them down? Why are the five eyes countries so concerned about the security risks of Huawei 5G hardware?

theonlybutlet 5y ago

A solution in search of a problem? Ah cool lets call for social credits or something just cause it gets to use cool tech...

ABoredBirb 5y ago

Longtime HN lurker here, finally something I can chime in on, as I was involved with the development of the Covid19 tracing app for my country. > limited deployment – any technology requires a sufficiently high number of users; Sure, yes, that's true for anything. > security and privacy concerns – many weaknesses and privacy leakages are documented I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API. > lack of reliability – BLE-based apps are prone to errors due to the usage of signal-strength measure- ments to infer contacts; We did extensive testing and the only issues we found was that BLE couldn't tell distance very accurately, but still, we could, with high enough confidence, tell that two phones were within 5m of each other or so. There was also the issue of BLE signal going through walls, which meant you might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case. > data governance – there exists a double standard in governing users’ location data, with fine-grained tracking of device location available only to private companies such as Google or Apple Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data, only proximity data and even that is only stored on the users device and never transmitted elsewhere. GApple covid19 tracing api is based on the DP-3T tracing protocol, the (very human readable) whitepaper of which can be read here: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%20Paper.pdf https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%... There was a lot of disinformation regarding contact tracing apps, both from tin-foil hat wearers, incompetent (or maybe corrupt?) state officials as well as competing, centralized (and actually privacy-breaching) solutions. I can still see a lot of this going around.

hansel_der 5y ago
> I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API. data leaks in the api itself will come to light, rest assured. but as you said, the problems with everyting besides the vendor-api have already caused a lot of privacy havoc. > ou might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case. in a literal sense; yes :D but let me assure you that ppl putting their phone near a wall is absolutely not uncommon. > Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data again you seem to willfully misconstrue the allegation. let me tell you that just because the tracing app itself does not have precise location data, the problem of creating yet another record on your phone, attesting your behaviour, is not going away. i take it you are not (yet?) critical of privacy implications of your $dayjob, but try to respect the concerns of ppl that are unilaterly affected by them.