it is just shockingly important that we come out of this _without_ a dystopian nightmare of a surveillance state.
That apple's involved in this is hopeful -- their earlier work on anonymizing Maps.app directions is well worth thinking about here. tl;dr your route is broken up into n chunks, each chunk gets a uuid that isn't tied to your handset, and so serverside nobody knows where Bob's Iphone just asked to go. [0]
Doing this kind of "differential privacy" or whatever we want to call it today properly is very hard, but it is also very, very important to get right.
I am hoping that Apple being involved will keep this as privacy respecting as it reasonably can be given what it is doing.
I am generally someone that takes privacy very seriously, I mostly avoid Google products and others for this reason.
But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all done, and preferably the code removed completely. I trust Apple to do this, not sure if I would trust google too.
> But... this may be a time that the privacy concerns are worth loosening a bit for the good of this. But that comes with the caveat that I hope this is disabled when this is all done, and preferably the code removed completely.
Any right you're willing to give up now, you've demonstrated a willingness to give up. You won't get it back. Either it'll remain lost forever, or it'll be used as evidence for a future proposal to take it away permanently (rhetoric: you agreed to it for X, and clearly any person who isn't morally bankrupt values Y over merely X; you're not morally bankrupt are you? And the need for Y will never go away...).
By all means, let's carefully give people tools to supplement their memory, to help people voluntarily notify others who need to be tested. Let's not, however, make that information available to anyone other than the owner of the device.
The problem is, what's the better option right now. Clearly the measures that are being taken are not actually working, people are still being infected and the ability to track the person you happen to walk past or stand next to waiting for your pickup.
I am conflicted about this... but as of right now I also feel like its necessary.
I don't understand this absolutist mindset. It doesn't have to work this way. We can have, say, the draft - an absolutely whopping restriction on civil liberties - during WWII but get rid of it when it's no longer needed.
(From a UK perspective, though I now live in the USA):
Can anyone think of a recent situation where the UK government has given back a power it has temporarily taken? This is a genuine question - I cannot. The closest was a stand taken by David Davis against 90-day detention without charge during the Blair administration (though he has since proved rather more illiberal than this position would suggest).
In the UK at least, while it might not _have_ to work that way, in practice it does.
We haven't gotten rid of it, it still exists. It just isn't being used right now. Getting rid of it would be to abolish it entirely, and instead require people to voluntarily consent in the future. (And if you can't get people to agree to it, perhaps that should tell you something.) "needed" isn't even a factor here.
An involuntary mechanism for contact or location tracing that's accessible to governmental authorities without the consent of the user is a civil rights violation, whether it's being actively used at the moment or not.
The American public exercised their power to elect politicians who'd end the draft as the Vietnam War got progressively more unpopular. It's well within our powers, if we care enough.
Is it, in fact, "well within our powers", or do you just believe it is? I don't, in general, believe "we could take this power away from government if we wanted to" is true without an existence proof.
That apple's involved in this is hopeful -- their earlier work on anonymizing Maps.app directions is well worth thinking about here. tl;dr your route is broken up into n chunks, each chunk gets a uuid that isn't tied to your handset, and so serverside nobody knows where Bob's Iphone just asked to go. [0]
Doing this kind of "differential privacy" or whatever we want to call it today properly is very hard, but it is also very, very important to get right.
[0] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/03/13/apple-maps-navigati...