Utopia Talk / Politics / Track and trace

Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 14 14:17:00 You can make a track trace software for phones, that protects your privacy works great and the algorithm is open source. Easy, this is not a real hurdle.
jergul large member	Thu May 14 14:29:20 iphone users would be easy to quarantine at least. Just have the phone turn off if outside a specific location. That would keep them in one place.
Rugian Member	Thu May 14 14:31:29 Track and trace talk simply means that I try not to bring my phone with me when I go outside. Governments and the tech giants have forfeited the right to be trusted on privacy issues.
jergul large member	Thu May 14 14:33:14 Ruggy You are obviously not an iphone user. Nimi For people like Ruggy. Don't vets have equipment required to insert a subdermal tag? Iphone users don't need it of course. I was thinking about the other ones.
Seb Member	Thu May 14 15:56:51 The problem with track and trace solely by phones is that it it's not complete. It's helps, but can only supplement. Say 75% of phone users have the app, then phones will only cspture 56% of contacts between people with the disease. So you still need to do the interviews. If only we had a lot of unemployed people who could sit in front of a phone.
Seb Member	Thu May 14 15:58:15 What the phones do is speed up the process, even if you only get 56% of contacts, you get them very quickly.
Seb Member	Thu May 14 16:00:09 Rugian: The API that Google and Apple have collaborated on is fully decentralised and anonymous. Can't be used to track you.
Daemon Member	Thu May 14 16:12:08 That Bluetooth shit works like shit for that purpose. That bothers me more than privacy concerns. http://for...uth-korea-singapore-australia/ [...] Scientists are still unsure how the coronavirus spreads, but the firm consensus is that most people catch the disease either by being in close proximity to a cough or sneeze, or by picking it up from a surface. The first could happen in an instant, say in a supermarket aisle, while the second could occur hours later when you unpack your groceries. That’s why health workers wear face masks and wash their hands: They have to protect against both direct and indirect transmission. Neither transmission route fits the logic of tracking apps. When a person tests positive for the coronavirus, tracking apps notify other people who have been near the infected person in recent weeks. Singapore’s tracking app is supposed to notify all people who have been within 2 meters of an infected person for at least 30 minutes, while Australia’s app claims to notify people who have been within 1.5 meters for at least 15 minutes. Since Bluetooth can’t actually be used reliably to measure distances, these figures suggest an illusory precision. The inconsistency between what the apps measure and how the virus spreads puts governments in a bind. Set the time window too narrow, and the app will classify millions of people as possibly infected, requiring the government to track down everyone who has ever passed a coronavirus carrier on the street. Set the time window too wide, and the app will flag too few exposures to the virus. There is no “Goldilocks” zone in the middle of these two extremes. Set the threshold at 15 or 20 minutes of close proximity to an infected person, and the coronavirus app will identify a moderate number of people for health authorities to contact. But most of the people who have contracted the disease from the infected person casually—that supermarket sneeze comes to mind—will be missed. The other problem is that actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have. To find those transmissions, you have to wade through an enormous number of casual contacts, and that means tracking down virtually everyone. Once governments reach that point, they’re no better off than if they had simply relied on effective but labor-intensive human contact tracing in the first place, without the app. Unfortunately, the coronavirus simply does not spread in the way that epidemiologists model it statistically. That’s not necessarily a problem—for our understanding of broader progress of the pandemic. But the models usually simplify reality in ways that work on average, even if they don’t apply to any particular case. We’re therefore making a grave methodological error when we expect reality at the level of individual cases to reflect our models for the numbers overall, instead of the other way around. Any technological solution to the coronavirus pandemic has to be grounded in the reality of one-on-one transmission, not epidemiological statistics. The only way to make coronavirus tracking apps really work is to accept the burden of false alarms and track every person, all the time, everywhere. This is only possible in a totalitarian state such as China, yet even the Chinese government doesn’t have the resources to implement such extreme levels of monitoring. With advances in artificial intelligence, it is possible that it soon will—and when that day comes, China will be prepared for the next pandemic. The rest of the world will probably take the virus over the cure.
Seb Member	Thu May 14 16:35:55 Faulty logic in that post Daemon. The policy goal of these apps isn't to protect an individual using it, or any specific person who might have otherwise come into contact with an infected person who has been alerted by the app. It's to lower R0, which is statistical quantity. You don't need to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. The decentralised app works fine for this. If you reduce the number of people each person infects on average, it's a plus. But yeah, you need to work on false positives or people will simply ignore the app. Indeed, looking at overall effectiveness I would bet good money that you actually want to tolerate not warning a bunch of people who might have come into contact according to the app to minimise false positives and the behavioural shift that comes from false positives.
Forwyn Member	Thu May 14 16:37:28 "The API that Google and Apple have collaborated on is fully decentralised and anonymous. Can't be used to track you." > implying intelligence agencies can't coordinate anonymous handshakes with existing dragnetted geo and metadata. lol
Seb Member	Thu May 14 16:38:50 Apps can only be part of a solution. You still need social distancing, and more use of face masks, you need anti body tests and serology to track immunity. You need rapid antigen tests to minimise isolation length for those who are suspected of being infected. You need manual track and trace. And hopefully a really effective vaccine in 18 months.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 14 16:43:17 Seb Yes, the hurdle is getting coverage. How do you get people to install it, especially with privacy concerns, which reasonable to have. Forwyn No factor. Your phone can be communicating with other phones in total gibberish codes ”handshakes”. Make it open source.
Seb Member	Thu May 14 16:47:09 Forwyn: Intelligence agencies can track your phone anyway, without the app. They just get the info from the cell phone companies. The data the intelligence agencies have easy access to don't include the Bluetooth identifier apple/google system uses so how exactly are they going to match it to the base station data? But ignoring that, how exactly do the intelligence agencies intercept short range Bluetooth signals at scale? Nah, the app adds no obvious additional privacy risk over carying a phone.
Forwyn Member	Thu May 14 18:01:32 Assuming the NSA/CIA haven't already found a solution to short-burst mesh services, which is optimistic, this solves that for them. An end user, such as an epidemiologist, has to be able to read the data, otherwise it's just a "total gibberish codes 'handshake'". Google has a long history with the NSA, so there's no reason to assume they wouldn't have access to the same tables. Apple perhaps less so.
Forwyn Member	Thu May 14 18:02:30 Being able to cut labor and processing power needed to analyze personal interactions streamlines intelligence activities.
sam adams Member	Thu May 14 18:09:39 "iphone users would be easy to quarantine at least. Just have the phone turn off if outside a specific location. That would keep them in one place. " Jergul made a funny
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