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0 pointsBarrin926y ago0 comments

>But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.[..] 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.

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baybal26y ago

Even without that, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all have a no joke civil service. Them being able to come up with something in the time of crisis fast is a consequence of that, not the other way around.

Even if one or two piecemeal measures like that were to be implemented, it will not change the fact of terrific ineptitude of current, and few previous office holders.

Without fixing that first, you will never get to the level of trust needed for the society to function, and not to fall apart upon first serious crisis.

In comparison to East Asia, North America is a very uneventful place, where the apparatus of state has not been truly stress tested in decades. For every Katrina USA had, countries in Asia have like 20, and having non-idiots in the office is much more of an existential need.

Even in a patently broken country like PRC, it's the response to natural disasters which is the only thing that really tickles the CPC when it comes to public anger.

Reelin6y ago

> I will continue to be mystified ... people in Singapore give some data to authorities and they can still go out and live their lives. I want material freedom ... not some sort of religious dogmatic privacy ...

For what it's worth, I think open source, opt-in, decentralized, user controlled contact tracing such as that being discussed above is about as good a solution as we can hope for in such a situation.

That being said, I think you've completely failed to understand why some people respond the way they do. Their concerns aren't about freedom in the short term, but rather civil liberties in the long term. Quarantines will necessarily be lifted, but government surveillance has a nasty tendency not to go away. More generally, civil liberties are permanently lost with a disturbing consistency no matter how temporary the original intent.

Nobody out there is either fully informed or perfectly rational, so it's important to understand the underlying motivations behind other's viewpoints if you want to get anywhere. I'm certainly dissatisfied by the incredible ineptitude the US has displayed, but I also value my civil liberties highly and wouldn't want to live in Taiwan. Make of that what you will.

jhanschoo6y ago

> Their concerns aren't about freedom in the short term, but rather civil liberties in the long term.

What's interesting to me is that with the right institutions, surveillance does not actually even diminish one's right to qualified privacy.

It can be illegal to use identifiable data for various purposes, or illegal to use identifiable data in a non-fiduciary manner.

With respect to abuses of the surveillance power, it can be employed against those in power as well, to prevent abuses of their power. e.g. police bodycam can work against abusive police if the laws should support it.

So it's important to see surveillance as a sword that needs proper laws to use responsibly, that allows a society with proper laws to obtain better freedom from actual harm and also a better quality of life. If we should just bury our heads as the technology materializes, the abusers will be the ones to exploit surveillance infrastructure.

In cautionary tales like Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Brave New World, or in the design of the Panopticon, the surveillance power was in the hands of a large power, not themselves held accountable by surveillance. But with the right laws, a citizenry can hold a government accountable and limit government and powerful offices by surveillance. These tales fail to see the how surveillance can help strengthen egalitarian institutions. They were more concerned with demonstrating just how powerful surveillance is, a reasonable point, than with how it could be employed to reinforce egalitarian institutions.

eecc6y ago

I find it pathetic that people wail to the high heavens about this abstract concept of privacy you mention and pensively quote Benjamin Franklin, while clicking away all their most intimate shit to check out some stupid Facebook game.

Get your priorities right: “you won’t believe...” clickbait no. Contact tracing to stop a disease that turns your lungs to frothy blood-juice. Fuck yes

mellow20206y ago

> while clicking away all their most intimate shit to check out some stupid Facebook game.

That doesn't describe me, that describes the straw man your require to be at ease with your own choices, which in turn is the only signal in your comment.

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