Let's not forget that these people, not a long time ago, worked hand-in-hand with the government to promote contact tracing applications at a time where it was clear that they could potentially be used to steal data from their users.
I personally refuse to use any contact tracing because an envitible consequence of its adoption is the idea that mass surveillance is legitimate so long as it can be argued it's keeping people safe.
Tech like this is always abused by governments. Just look at how governments are attacking encrypted messaging services today. It would be naive to think same thing wouldn't happen for any popular privacy-first contact tracing app.
Contact Tracing is an awesome way to use the technology in theory, however, while a bit conspiracy theory-ish, it can also be used as trojan policy to allow unfettered warrantless access to location data, mass surveillance, and anything else they'd like that could be exfiltrated from user devices.
Anything that has the ability to be exploited will be exploited for purposes.
We have a generally healthy level of distrust for our governments as well as big business, and given the consistent evidence, I feel that's generally warranted. (Government is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around).
I would never opt-in for this nor would I trust it.
In this specific case, I'm really glad they're exercising their power, because they seem to be doing it in the best possible way, and have forced governments to do the right, privacy-preserving thing.
And I think having this power is OK - nobody should be forced to help the government implement something unethical. There may be scenarios where this goes horribly wrong, but the contact tracing framework is a case where it went perfectly right.
Yes, the QR-checkin feature is something where an exception could make sense, but given what it would pave the way for, I'm glad they keep the rules strict.
In some positive light, 3-4 years ago Google or Facebook would've jumped on and published a contact tracing app without thinking twice. I wonder what's going on inside in terms of discussions. Some positive side effect of the tech slash to step back and think twice of side effects or maybe they've learn to avoid possible bad PR.
As an Australian who has privacy concerns their government's COVIDSafe app (see https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing), and hence not installing it, I'm really thankful that Apple and Google are pushing this model of contact tracing. We still don't know if digital contact tracing is effective in practice, but it's still important to try, but we can do this in a way that avoids giving governments with worrying authoritarian tendencies another tool.
The interest in "privacy" around contact tracing seems like a ship that sailed a long time ago to me. Verizon etc all already have this data, and it isn't "private", and so does uber, lyft, and every other overly-aggressive-permission-askning-app that anybody has ever installed.
Privacy is really important: but we lost it all a long long time ago. Maybe saying "well now we can do a good job of contact tracing" is at least some good coming out of that loss of privacy. I just hope we don't end up wasting time trying to make the contact tracing "private" as if by doing otherwise we'd be giving something up that we didn't already give up long ago.
I wonder how quickly contact tracing applications will be leveraged for other uses. If a significant number of protesters are using such an application then I imagine government will throw the “for your protection“ excuse to go harvest information from the phones of protesters to see who was meeting with him and who their social circles are. Of course, to keep us and our children safe.
Sure... that’s part of why the Apple/Google contact tracing system is important. It sets the standard which includes privacy, transparency and opt-in at each step. It will be harder for governments to overstep once the standard is set.
that isn't a reason to be complacent about furthering governmental/corporate surveillance capabilities.
in fact, it should remind us to take away those prior surveillance capabilities, and demand any contact tracing system to give control to users and be fully off-limits to large power structures (e.g., only shared between users and researchers).
and being hard to do so is no excuse. we have millions of people we can work on the problem if it's so important to warrant such massive effort.
It's an unjustified claim and a little demeaning, but not obviously wrong. But citizens choosing to believe in the effectiveness of digital contact tracing is a far larger variable in the success of these apps than the quality of the app itself.
I think it's important to remember how March-us was thinking. It was much more important back then to have a working system than the best possible system, and frankly if this is the price of good contact tracing it's probably worth it.
The project was given to a political party associate/donor.
They basically forked the Singapore (from memory) open source app and re-skinned it.
They didn't wait for Google/Apple's updates allowing OS-level integration, meaning there were battery issues from Bluetooth drain.
In some states, they didn't create the proper legal framework, meaning police (and lots of other organisations) were able to get access to the data.
Due to the legal and battery issues, no one trusted it and stopped using it.
It found under 50~ contacts in total, and only 2 contacts that were previously unknown from other contact tracing efforts.
Also, the federal government at the time were very secretive - refused to publish data on the app or published it late or in useless summary form, didn't provide any details as to success rate, denied/stalled FOI requests.
I had thought that Apple and Google are in the best position to distribute contact tracing widely [1] but couldn’t figure out if they were working on it. It turns out they were.
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