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by ExtremePopcorn
2274 days ago
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I've had my moments during all this too, no worries. > I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights. Check out this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-fever-... > Just last Saturday, Kinsa’s data indicated an unusual rise in fevers in South Florida, even though it was not known to be a Covid-19 epicenter. Within days, testing showed that South Florida had indeed become an epicenter. You buried the lede a bit on your prior experience (that's significant context!) but I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots. I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that. |
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>But I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots
If you word it like that that is a legit goal yes. We just need to be aware that when something is on the Internet people are going to abuse it. There are also state actors who could be interested in manipulating data like that in the worst case. Imagine you got a country to shut down or divert ressources to certain places by feeding them false data. This is not something too far fetched these days.
>I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
I understand what you want to say and yes it's the governments obligation to verify the accuracy of the data they want to act on and not the software engineers, but it does help if they already get data that they can work with.
From years of working for governments, if you work with/for the Government always pretend they have no clue what they are doing and prepare for the worst.