Working From Home - Impacts of Coronavirus

[PlainName]

I mean people think nothing of handing over their personal information to social networking sites

Some people do. And those people will probably accept that coronavirus trumps (sorry!) any privacy worries. Which is understandable since they don't have any worries in the first place (otherwise they wouldn't be on Facebook et al.).

but anything associated in some way with government and the conspiracy theories start to fly

Snowden showed us real life trumps (again! sorry) conspiracy theories in that regard.

But the big difference is that social media won't kick down your front door at 6am because their erroneous reading of your intertubes traffic suggests you're a terrorist or kiddy fiddler. You can log out of social media; you can't turn off your local (or higher) PTB.

[james_s]

Rationally this is true, but people are not rational about these things.

Facebook might not kick in your door, but it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the government entities keep close tabs on social networking sites, they can access anything you post on there either by social engineering or with a court order.

I don't let social apps anywhere near my phone. I'd be willing to install a Covid tracking app on a temporary basis though. I'm not interesting enough for someone to actually want to track me but I still don't want to just hand over my data without getting something valuable in return. I consider tracking the spread of a pandemic, determining just how bad it is and quickly identifying outbreaks in order to allow most of us a return to some degree of normalcy to be a pretty significant return. Many don't think like that though.

[vodka]

What I find annoying is that every country seems to want to develop their own Corona tracking app. In the end the functionality is the same because the problem is exactly the same for everyon so why not use one and the same app? I get the impression some government officials have the pipe dream of developing an app that somehow doesn't need to collect any information 

For what? It is more effective closing the border  Today, it is the first day that allow to walk the children. The people have gone out like the chicken meme.  I believe that Dance Coffin  guys are going to work until end Summer.

[floobydust]

The phone tracking and logging is just google and Apple pushing their "surveillance capitalism" onto people so they can improve their analytics and know where you go, who you associate with, sans permission.
Look at these pictures, a phone app is utterly useless - unless the police get to use it to issue tickets. CCP is right on, having full freedom is dangerous 

[bd139]

People might want to read up on how it works before actually making that assumption. This is not positional tracking. The governments asked for that and Google and Apple told them to get fucked.

[nctnico]

People might want to read up on how it works before actually making that assumption. This is not positional tracking. The governments asked for that and Google and Apple told them to get fucked.

Correct! The Dutch government even demands the app to be open source so everyone can see inside.

[floobydust]

I understand this as Bluetooth tracking compared with GPS tracking. Converting a Bluetooth UUID to an actual person's ID or phone number requires access to private information and your contact list, and who trusts these cheezy app developers to not harvest it all and sell it to third parties ala zuckerburg style and claim it was a hack.

My municipality already uses Bluetooth tracking along freeways and major roadways, where it picks off your BT devices (car NAV, phone, iPad, FitBit etc) and uses their "anonymized MAC address" to determine your travel times for traffic congestion etc.  No permissions or app needed. It can also be used in a mall to see where you are and how long you spend in sections of a store, for analytics.  As I said, I know the husband's BT UUID and to run when it comes up 

I don't see the point in moving towards being a (proximity) surveillance state, every precedent set removing privacy by corporations leads us towards their profit motive of monetizing our private information.

[coppice]

Apparently the Covidsafe bluetooth application is now ready for Australians to download.    
They should make it so if you are in close proximity to somebody else for too long your
phone generates an annoyingly loud coughing sound, better to be safe than sick.   

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-26/coronavirus-tracing-app-covidsafe-australia-government-covid-19/12186130

They clearly got this idea by reversing what happens in the movie Wedlock. They'll quickly find people cheat, and don't have their phone with them 100% of the time. So, version 2 will require you be fitted with a collar, and if you move too close to someone it will blow your head off. 

[nctnico]

I understand this as Bluetooth tracking compared with GPS tracking. Converting a Bluetooth UUID to an actual person's ID or phone number requires access to private information and your contact list, and who trusts these cheezy app developers to not harvest it all and sell it to third parties ala zuckerburg style and claim it was a hack.

But Corona tracking apps don't work that way. The Bluetooth ID gets hashed (which means converted to a unique fingerprint which cannot be traced back to the original; see SHA256 for example). On your phone you'll have a list with those fingerprints for a couple of weeks. A central server receives messages from phones of which the user says he/she is infected and you get a message saying a fingerprint is infected.

In short: there is no absolute location tracking involved and no personal c.q. traceable information is shared. Also many Corona tracking apps are open source so anyone can see how it works. As bd139 wrote: you should really do some investigation into how Corona tracking apps actually work instead of writing utter nonsense.

[coppice]

People might want to read up on how it works before actually making that assumption. This is not positional tracking. The governments asked for that and Google and Apple told them to get fucked.

If the app can't trace a person's activity, and who they were near, isn't it just useless feel good fluff?

[PlainName]

As james_s wrote:

It was bd139, actually, but I bet no-one's ever seen them in the same room together

As an anti-Googler and not a fan of Apple either, I have to hand it to them that they have got this one exactly right. I'd have no issue either installing the app or allowing the OS to do it all (which it will, eventually, according to their plan). At least, at the moment - no doubt someone will figure out a good hack which will defeat them at some point.

And that embedding in the OS thing should tell us that this is here to stay, so the government version won't be just for a couple of months and then you remove it. After this pandemic there will be another, but hopefully we will be better prepared to mitigate it, via things like this BT feature and non-depleted stockpiles, and it will be much less hassle.

[SiliconWizard]

Another question: how can the app know who is infected? I suppose it entirely relies on each invidual voluntarily declaring this through the app? How reliable would that be really, knowing we are definitely not nearly as obedient/compliant as korean or chinese people?

[PlainName]

and who there were near

Doesn't need to know who they were near. Just that the owner of the phone that handed out such-and-such ID, which was colocated last week, has gone down with it. The only info held centrally is what ID to broadcast as being a dodgy one. Done right, even that central won't know who, or even what phone, it's just some anonymous number.

Having said that, it might be possible for TPTB to take someone's phone and see what IDs they've been next to, and then pick someone elses phone and see if it generated any of those IDs. That'd be really tedious, though, and they'd have to be pretty sure who to try it on with before getting started or they'd be there all week.

[PlainName]

How reliable would that be really, knowing we are

My guess is it will take about 4 hours before someone fakes being infected just for the laughs. And someone really infected might have other things on their mind than dicking around with a phone app. In which case there would have to be some 'official' interaction - perhaps a code that only a doctor confirming an infection will provide to prevent false positive abuse, and 'strong incentive' to set yourself as being infected if/when you are.

[bd139]

How it works for the uneducated.

https://www.blog.google/documents/57/Overview_of_COVID-19_Contact_Tracing_Using_BLE.pdf

The governments want tracking. The smartphone vendors are only allowing anonymous token exchanges over bluetooth LE (token accumuation). In fact the NHS here got all pissy when Apple said not to them.

[Syntax Error]

@eevForumBloggers:

You can read the full technical Google/Apple contact tracking and tracing over Bluetooth API [draft] specifications here:

Google and Apple are releasing draft documentation for an Exposure Notification system in service of privacy-preserving contact tracing:

https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/

[SiliconWizard]

How reliable would that be really, knowing we are

My guess is it will take about 4 hours before someone fakes being infected just for the laughs. And someone really infected might have other things on their mind than dicking around with a phone app. In which case there would have to be some 'official' interaction - perhaps a code that only a doctor confirming an infection will provide to prevent false positive abuse, and 'strong incentive' to set yourself as being infected if/when you are.

Sorry, I fail to see how that could work in practice.
They are all swearing 1/ that people can't be individually traced, 2/ that its use will only be voluntary. What kind of strong incentive are you talking about exactly?

[floobydust]

I understand this as Bluetooth tracking compared with GPS tracking. Converting a Bluetooth UUID to an actual person's ID or phone number requires access to private information and your contact list, and who trusts these cheezy app developers to not harvest it all and sell it to third parties ala zuckerburg style and claim it was a hack.

But Corona tracking apps don't work that way. The Bluetooth ID gets hashed (which means converted to a unique fingerprint which cannot be traced back to the original; see SHA256 for example). On your phone you'll have a list with those fingerprints for a couple of weeks. A central server receives messages from phones of which the user says he/she is infected and you get a message saying a fingerprint is infected.

In short: there is no absolute location tracking involved and no personal c.q. traceable information is shared. Also many Corona tracking apps are open source so anyone can see how it works. As bd139 wrote: you should really do some investigation into how Corona tracking apps actually work instead of writing utter nonsense.

How does the hashed Bluetooth ID or beacon get resolved back to the original person for notification?

I'm holding my pitchfork because Canada has does not have the EU GPDR regulation wrt data privacy, so we constantly get Silicon Valley/USA datamining in apps.

"...Once {app} enabled, users’ devices will regularly send out a beacon via Bluetooth that includes a privacy-preserving identifier — basically, a string of random numbers that aren’t tied to a user's identity and change every 10-20 minutes for additional protection. Other phones will be listening for these beacons and broadcasting theirs as well. When each phone receives another beacon, it will record and securely store that beacon on the device."
"At least once per day, the system will download a list of beacons that have been verified as belonging to people confirmed as positive for COVID-19 from the relevant public health
authority. Each device will check the list of beacons it has recorded against the list downloaded from the server. If there is a match between the beacons stored on the device and the positive diagnosis list, the user may be notified and advised on steps to take next."

"In the second phase, available in the coming months, this capability will be introduced at the operating system level to help ensure broad adoption, which is vital to the success of contact tracing."

Let's look at it backwards then, the privacy policy on these lovely nice sweet coronavirus apps:
UK COVID Symptom Tracker Privacy Notice
Third party processors for both kinds of information

We use third parties to process some of your personal data on our behalf. When we allow them access to your data, we do not permit them to use it for their own purposes. We have in place with each processor, a contract that requires them only to process the data on our instructions and to take proper care in using it. They are not permitted to keep the data after our relationship with them has ended.

These processors include:

    Amazon Web Services
    Google Cloud Platform
    SurveyMonkey
    Segment
    Google Analytics
    Mixpanel
    Google G-Suite
    MailChimp
    Mailgun
    Intercom
    Sentry
    Google Firebase
    SwiftyBeaver

It's this third-party shit where they get to use your private data for their internal purposes - why I would not participate.

[SiliconWizard]

"In the second phase, available in the coming months, this capability will be introduced at the operating system level to help ensure broad adoption, which is vital to the success of contact tracing."

Yeah, even just that, I'm not sure people have realized what that meant in the long run.

"help ensure broad adoption," means: making it unavoidable. That's politician's talk.

And if that gets deep into operating systems, you can be sure it will be used, reused and abused in the long run.

[bd139]

Floobydust: We use most of those and we’re fintech and have full control over the data. They are service providers.

Back in the old days the same shit happened but in crates of paper and EDI dial ups...

[james_s]

The phone tracking and logging is just google and Apple pushing their "surveillance capitalism" onto people so they can improve their analytics and know where you go, who you associate with, sans permission.

They already have that, Google's whole business model is based on compiling massive amounts of information on people, their interests, buying habits and whereabouts. Any kind of Covid tracking is not going to give them anything more useful in their goals of gathering marketing data than what they already have.

I don't really understand why everyone thinks everything is some kind of conspiracy. The surreptitious tracking for marketing data is already widespread, the Covid tracking is a voluntary thing many of us are willing to do in order to try to provide a benefit to society as a whole. The paranoid delusional reaction that seems so widespread is bizarre to me. If you don't want to help then fine, but please stay out of the way and let the rest of us try to make a positive difference.

[rdl]

If they can put this tracker on a stand alone device that I can carry in my pocket, I'm in. I don't own a smartphone, probably never will.

[SilverSolder]

Having Bluetooth on constantly is going to kill the battery fast too. 

[james_s]

You're very much in the minority, likely less than 0.001% of the population. The number of people who don't own a smartphone is statistically irrelevant, there's no need to develop a standalone device. If you really wanted to volunteer, I'm sure someone would give you an old smartphone that could be used strictly for the tracking app if that was the desire.

[PlainName]

What kind of strong incentive are you talking about exactly?

Your guess is as good as mine. Could range from absolutely nothing to, say, access to a ventilator. Free beer, maybe. Lots of possibilities!