>Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
I have never said that so I am not sure what to tell you. The only method that works is quarantine, remote control is a copout to address the lack of contact with the population. Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone.
> Israel's approach for example
On this topic, Israel tech companies are right now sending out business proposals to the Italian government to try and implement their methods (viz. https://www.ilgazzettino.it/nordest/primopiano/coronavirus_z... last thing Europe needs during this crysis is ANOTHER political mindset shift towards walls and a iron boot.
Literally nobody in the epi community believes that. Would you please state your credentials, or cite a credible source for that statement? (For the opposite, please do read takes from Trevor Bedford, Mark Lipsitch, Carl Bergstrom, Andy Slavitt or really pretty much anybody in the field)
We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool. As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment)
Yes, there are privacy concerns. Work on them. Address them. But blanket statements like "only quarantine works" are extremely detrimental to public health efforts - the last thing you want is an "all or nothing" mindset
How do you know that this is the current state?
> As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment)
"meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?
Look at the number of cases and their regional distribution, realize that those are tested cases and thus, with a) asymptomatic carriers and b) really bad testing in the US, the number of active cases is at least 10x that. Then realize you're dealing with an exponential process. United States are thoroughly infected already.
> "meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?
Not now, but if and when the US implements proper suppression measures, and the number of cases goes down to manageable levels (while at the same time the supply chain of PPE catches up to demand), then the supply of equipment will be meaningful.
But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.
> It’s why most of them don’t get to this point.
But we are at this point already.
Singapore isn't. (the government that is building this app). Neither is Taiwan. Through a combination of contact tracing, surveillance, national health databases and enforcing compliance of quarantined individuals by for example regularly checking in on them they have been able to both contain the spread of the disease and keep a reasonable amount of economic and social life intact.
I will continue to be mystified by this weird and abstract notion of privacy that keeps others away from my data but results in mass lockdown, quarantines, shutdowns and curfews, while people in Singapore give some data to authorities and they can still go out and live their lives. I want material freedom to buy groceries and go to work, not some sort of religious dogmatic privacy while some plague wreaks havoc and I need to haul up in my apartment for months.
Lockdown buys time to introduce new measures. Those measures are:
1. Quarantining positive individuals.
2. Physically enforcing that quarantine. The honor system doesn't work. People are very clearly not obeying voluntary quarantine.
3. Contact tracing, and testing of everyone that positive individuals have interacted with.
Once we get a system that can handle 1, 2, and 3 in place, we can lift the lockdown. This is how Korea and Singapore are beating the virus. This is how China's going to be lifting their lockdown.
That's because every single Western country has fucked up the handling of initial stages of the pandemic. Everyone has seen what's going on in China and then Italy, and we all ended up on the spectrum of doing too little, too late (US in particular is leading here).
"Stay at home", social distancing, closing up businesses - those are suppression strategies. They're meant to shut the virus spread down. But they don't have to last all the way until the vaccine - if the number of cases and infection rate go down enough, these measures can be lifted - and then contact tracing can be used to do local quarantines and shutdowns with surgical precision, ensuring most people can live their daily lives as if no pandemic was happening.
Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed?
The way I see it is so long as there is a pandemic we have no freedom anyway. It might seem like tracking your citizens is infringing a freedom, but if the option is house arrest I don’t mind.
Any government that would be ready to monitor everyone all the time for no obvious reason isn’t democratic. I trust my government because I live in a functioning democracy. I wouldn’t trust the Chinese government, or even the Hungarian one, and I‘d have second thoughts about trusting the US govt to do the right thing. But most democracies should be able to use technology to provide more freedom in this situation, not less. It’s a true test of a democracy to do this right. But not trying of fear of a perpetual big brother society I think is the wrong choice.
There's a risk that once the capacity is tried and tested, governments and private companies alike will try to make it enticing and useful for different means. The role of privacy activists should be nipping all these follow-up ideas in the bud. Ensuring that emergency measures are used only during actual emergencies. But not fighting them in situations like this.
Actually I suppose this matches my view on location histories. I like them as an idea, but current implementations exfiltrate all the data off of my device which bothers me to no end.
This is tin foil hat nonsense. The US has implemented martial law before. Those rights weren't taken away forever.
People gave up the right to fly at all after 9/11. That was re-instituted for almost everyone in short order.
It was and still is. How do you believe this nonsense?
Also, several provisions from the Patriot Act haven't been renewed, so your example proves my point.
Since 9/11 in particular, the Western world has seen constant attempts to increase mass surveillance, lower the burden of proof, and dampen human rights, always in the name of whatever they have the public most fearful of at the time - drugs, terrorists, paedos, criminals, the Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, communists, Islam, foreigners taking our jobs, the boogey man de jour.
I'm absolutely certain that we'll see politicians try to use coronavirus as an excuse for their Orwellian schemes.
The future of society isn't no surveillance. That's not tractable. Genie's out of the bottle (as this release of a population tracking tool as open source demonstrates). The question isn't how to stop it; it's how to live with it.
What do you believe the truth was? I replied to somebody else in this thread who believed the truth was far wilder than anything in Snowden's leaks.
