My feeling is that while privacy is important, it's being taken a bit too seriously given the severity of the crisis.
Google and Facebook et al. carry out far more involved and intimate surveillance of people's lives than would be required for an app as described in the article.
(Disclosure: I'm a member of CCC and chairman of a local chapter.)
"Please install this app to save lives. Don't worry, it collects less data on your movements than Google Maps."
For those "40% only if privacy concerns are addressed" there is a gradient of privacy. How many of them will still have concerns no matter what? And how many will not install anything out of laziness/comfort?
Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are installed in 90%+ of phones and happily scoop up location data every day.
There is an additional technological cost, but that's what we should weigh the privacy costs against. The choice is between an app that doesn't care about privacy versus one that does.
Time is of the essence here. I agree that, all else being equal, privacy should be respected. However, if it takes multiple weeks to iron out all the potential privacy issues, this approach becomes much less effective.
Finally regarding Google/FB: Why would you give up even more of your privacy?
They're probably not going to care about people's views in the first place. Such regimes are already mandating apps of this type to be used.
> When you are close to another phone running TraceTogether, both phones use Bluetooth to exchange a Temporary ID. This Temporary ID is generated by encrypting the User ID with a private key held by the Ministry of Health (MOH).
From: https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/common/privacystatement
From that perspective whether it is open source is a secondary consideration.
If you become infected you have the option of broadcasting your ID as being infected and others can compare the infected list against the IDs collected on their phones.
None of the data you mentioned is being collected.
This time around shouldn't we aim for a better response and no fall out that will last decades on our responses?
I don't think this is doable. All protocols that we currently have have the ability to reveal this information in one way or another.
There are two fundamental approaches at the moment: soemthing like DP-3T which uses TCNs (temporary contact numbers) where contacts exchange temporary numbers. On infection you download the list of infected people and compare on your device for matches. This fundamentally reveals who was infected. Then you have centralized approaches where you hand out encrypted IDs which a central authority can decrypt. In the latter case you can just create new device IDs which again lets you easily figure out which of your contacts was infected.
In the latter case you have the theoretical possibility to detect such behavior due to the sheer amount of IDs generated by participants.
Generally the attack vector would be someone putting a beacon to a super market and making pictures of people going in and out and capture their IDs. Then they could figure out later which of the people got infected.
The Indian government does not have a great track record when it comes to privacy and information security. (https://www.firstpost.com/india/aadhaar-data-leak-details-of...) Aadhar is the Indian equivalent of the US SSN.
While the cause is noble, there is always the problem with setting precedents, and as governments are known to use Riders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation)), I don't trust them they won't use Covid-19 to further their agenda either.
This is what happens when you erode peoples trust. I for one will not be using these apps.
Why do we need to implement a surveillance state on top of that?
Most contact tracing comes up as part re-opening businesses (and schools, though in the US that will probably be in the fall), not as much for the current complete shutdown.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-corona... has a good explanation of why contact tracing is an important part of re-opening. The gist is that any amount of re-opening is likely to bring R0 much closer to 1 than it is during the current complete shutdown. The question then becomes how (well, how else) to minimize spread when new cases do occur.
Think of contact tracing as one way to replace the impact that’s currently provided by shutting everything down.
Maybe this isn't the dystopia we deserve, but it's the dystopia we need.
