The proposed technology is quite different from a service that located located devices. Rather, it would track what devices have been in proximity of each other, and not necessarily where.
I was speaking to the question of whether governments would then demand access to the data. They could force Apple and the Telcos to turn over the data they are already collecting pre-corona. I was just saying that that risk isn't new.
every new method of geo-tracking is a new risk because it provides yet another hole for politicians to legally exploit into a privacy concern.
Speaking about the US -- GPS and tower-tracking pose many of the same risks, but since the legal mandates were discussed at different parts in history, their legal allowed uses are different from one another.
If yet another geo-tracking capability comes online that just allows legislators to put forward legislation that will allow them to abuse that specific technology rather than the previous ones that allow them the same access, but were mandated more responsibly.
In other words : each new law has to be inspected from so many angles that eventually the angles will exceed the inspection ability, and our privacy will dwindle without much argument as we'll be unable to modify legislation quickly enough to keep up with tracking technologies; this seems to be on purpose and being abused actively in the United States.
it doesn't track which phones are next to each other, just identifiers it has seen. Those identifiers roll frequently, and the material to find contact only occurs if a person chooses to publish that information, and all that information does is say what their keys were.
Determining if you were in the vicinity is also done on device - you get a list of all the day keys from a person who has chosen to share that information, then from that you can create all the keys they would have used in that period, and see if your device has ever seen one of those keys. Presumably if it finds a match the device/app would post a "you should get tested" message.
