[mshroyer]

This is needlessly cynical. TraceTogether uses client-side logging so as to leave data in the hands of the users up until it's actually needed for contact tracing.

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.

Otherwise, apps may go a long way to improve the speed and accuracy of contact tracing. Here in the US, I'd much rather use a protocol like TraceTogether's Bluetrace that goes out of its way to preserve privacy, than adopt an actually-privacy-violating centralized approach where the government simply gathers everyone's location data and processes it centrally (Israel's approach, for example).

[tomcooks]

Cynical for sure, don't know about that "needlessly" given it's an endless fight where everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever. This time they give you the opensource bit, next time it's "a matter of emergency", then they stop asking and just punish you if you don't comply.

>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.

[groby_b]

"The only method that works is quarantine"

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

[bosie]

> We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool

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?

[TeMPOraL]

> How do you know that this is the current state?

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.

[bosie]

I guess i misunderstood surpression. Thought surpression is the early stages and not when you have been thouroughly infected already.

"meaningful supply" was in the context of avoiding a lockdown and hence i don't undrestand your answer. if you don't have the equipment now, how do you avoid the lockdown and make the levels go down without large quantities of dead people?

[groby_b]

I'm not an epidemiologist, or an MD, so with a large grain of salt:

Containment: Testing & contact tracing - you try to contain the disease before it widely spreads. Usually one of the early stages of fighting.

Mitigation: You can't contain any more, and you're trying to slow down the progress to avoid a large peak. Test & treat those with severe symptoms, encourage people with mild symptoms to stay home, encourage people to keep distance.

Suppression: Things have hit the fan. You need to drastically halt the progress of the epidemic. This is shelter-in-place, lockdown, quarantine etc. #staythefuckhome has become a bit more mandatory. That's pretty much where we are right now. You want to drastically reduce the number of infections in a short amount of time.

"Meaningful supply" was in the context of suppression actually taking hold. At some point, you're hopefully down to illness levels where containment or mitigation make sense again. But for that to happen, you need tests, you need PPE, you need infrastructure so you actually can contain. We're at suppression/lockdown because we failed at that the first time round.

So, it's not about avoiding the lockdown now.

The goal is lockdown now to prevent catastrophic overload and buy time to get supplies in place for later containment stages.

Hope that clarifies? But, of course, containment is not guaranteed to work, so we might be cycling back and forth between those measures

The report #9 from the Imperial College of London details the ideas behind that cycling approach: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

[closeparen]

The point of contact tracing is to find out who to quarantine, so you don’t have to lock down the entire population. It’s not a “copout,” it’s the bread and butter of epidemic mitigation. It’s why most of them don’t get to this point.

[mellow2020]

> The point of contact tracing is to find out who to quarantine, so you don’t have to lock down the entire population.

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.

[Barrin92]

>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.

[baybal2]

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.

[Reelin]

> 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.

[jhanschoo]

> 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.

[eecc]

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

[mellow2020]

> 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.

[vkou]

Stay at home is the mantra, but because there is zero enforcement of it, there's no shortage of stupid people coughing in grocery stores, or visiting out-of-state relatives, or fleeing the epidemic centers, bringing the virus into rural communities.

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.

[tempestn]

That doesn't mean we have to be forever. Extreme distancing / lockdown will be needed to get the outbreaks under control, but once that point is reached, extensive testing and contact tracing will be needed to relax those measures without triggering a massive resurgence, unless we want to wait a year or more for a vaccine.

[TeMPOraL]

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

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.

[alkonaut]

> Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone.

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed?

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.

[Reelin]

I completely agree. To that end, it actually seems like fully decentralized client side contract tracking would be a useful technology to have a set of government supported open specifications for. Building the functionality into the OS, securely encrypting (no key escrow!) with a user supplied password, and requiring a warrant to seize (but good luck without the password) would proactively enable a robust response to future pandemics.

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.

[TeMPOraL]

I share the feeling. I want my phone to collect data about me and my environment. But I want to own that data and use it for myself, not have it sent out to some third parties.

[golemiprague]

Israel already moved from a central system to a different one called Hamagen which is not centralised and keeps the privacy of the people. This is the one they recommend for Italy. It is open source so you can verify it yourself. https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native

[lern_too_spel]

> everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever.

This is tin foil hat nonsense. The US has implemented martial law before. Those rights weren't taken away forever.

[mardifoufs]

Wasn't the same said after 9/11 and the patriot act? I'd guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to think several three letter agencies would use the provisions from the patriot act to track pretty much all communications? You can't just accuse people of being conspiracy theorists over and over again and tell them that this time would be different because... Reasons? Also, who needs martial law when you can just do the same with duly passed laws?

[shadowgovt]

"Every time you give up a right, it's taken away forever" is still hyperbole.

People gave up the right to fly at all after 9/11. That was re-instituted for almost everyone in short order.

[SahAssar]

There is no right to fly. There was a right to privacy (at least as argued before the supreme court) and I think it could be said that is revoked because of the three-letter-agencies data collection that was justified by 9/11.

[lern_too_spel]

> I'd guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to think several three letter agencies would use the provisions from the patriot act to track pretty much all communications?

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.

[GordonS]

Sorry, but we are long past the point of calling out privacy advocates as "tinfoil hat wearers" - just look at everything that came out after Snowden. Beforehand, most people would have derided others for mentioning "such conspiracy nonsense" (I likely would have myself), and yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core, paranoid conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.

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.

[shadowgovt]

Business as usual has come after Snowden; that's the reason people who have a default-antagonistic reaction to any new technology that could be employed by a government for tracking get labeled "tinfoil-hat wearers."

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.

[GordonS]

> Business as usual has come after Snowden

I can't disagree with that; honestly, it felt like the media and politicians conspired to bury it. Revelation after revelation was made after outlets like The Intercept went through the evidence, yet hardly anything made the mainstream news, and when it did, it was fleeting. The CIA destroyed evidence and lied to congress, but there was little impact.

> The question isn't how to stop it; it's how to live with it

This I disagree with. We've been shown that the supposedly "benevolent" Western governments of today can't be trusted with laws that permit over-arching mass surveillance and the dampening of civil liberties and human rights, and we've seen the inevitable creeping escalations - who knows what a worse government of tomorrow might do?

[TeMPOraL]

How do you propose a XXI-century technologically advanced society can do to ensure its biosafety? The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful. Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to individuals and small groups. Society needs a defense to compensate. Biology is particularly nasty here, as it's self-replicating.

Quite honestly, I'm increasingly starting to believe that privacy has been on borrowed time ever since we discovered DNA. That doesn't mean all privacy is going to be gone; just that to survive, societies need to learn how to handle pandemics very swiftly, and that seems to require large-scale, real-time management.

[shadowgovt]

I don't think the issue went away because anyone conspired to bury it. I think the issue went away because, on average, Americans are comfortable with the arrangement that the intelligence agencies have broad power to dragnet data. They either don't get that these tools could be used against them by unethical government agents or they know that possibility exists but they trust the checks and balances against it and think the risk is outweighed by the benefit to law enforcement and the national intelligence community in managing the international threat of global terrorist activity (which, itself, leverages modern communications tools to communicate rapidly, move rapidlt, hide from law enforcement and military powers, etc.).

9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again, even 20 years later.

[lern_too_spel]

> yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core, paranoid conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.

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.

[Proziam]

> 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.

If the result is (another) permanent loss of privacy and freedom akin to the PATRIOT act, then yes.

Technology has immense power to do good for people, but only if those who deploy it do so ethically. How many governments around the world can we honestly predict to do so?

[shadowgovt]

Agree to disagree, because my liberty is useless without my life.

Balance can be found. And increasingly, it looks like in the modern era, the balance is found in a situation where the PATRIOT act exists and we find a new normal around its existence.

Which government of more than a few million people do you assume doesn't have a line into monitoring intra- and interstate digital communications in this era?

[throwanem]

I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying.

I regret that - assuming my own ongoing case of COVID-19 resolves without fatal complication - I'm quite likely, I think, to have that curiosity satisfied. I regret it because this isn't a cause for change of perspective which I would wish on anyone. But everything I'm seeing suggests it's a cause for change of perspective that many millions of people are going to have.

[Proziam]

My hope is that people don't lose sight of the long term in spite of the short term suffering we may experience. You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever. How many movements would have been impossible if a local government could spy on everyone to break it up before it even begins? I'm thankful we didn't have the same technology we have now during the civil rights movement, for example.

I sincerely hope for your swift recovery.

[hrasyid]

> You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever

With an app like tracetogether, you can just uninstall it after the pandemic, right? No need to surrender your rights forever.

[Proziam]

Until the government decides that it's in the public's best interest that such an application be installed on every phone, and non-removable.

We already have NSA / Tech company "collaboration" so this is hardly a huge step in terms of tech or privacy invasion. It would just be the next step.

[throwanem]

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You can only get sick and die once, but that lasts forever too.

[Proziam]

Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when their time comes.

Of course, 'you can only surrender your rights once' and 'you can only die once' aren't equivalent either. Once a nation of people surrenders their rights, nobody ever has those rights again (even if the loss of those rights costs lives). A person, or a group of people, becoming ill or passing away doesn't take away the lives of the next generation.

If you think back on the experiences of the last century, how much harm would be done if we couldn't freely assemble because a government decided to intervene? We'd have stayed in Vietnam longer, black folks may not have ever won their civil rights, and its possible women would be unable to vote.

For the record, I don't downplay the suffering of illness. I've lost a parent to cancer, as well as many other family members. Everyone else alive is in the same boat. We're all mortal.

[throwanem]

It's not really about what I want or don't want; for one thing, I don't have children and never will.

If I did, though, I suspect I would want them to live.

[TeMPOraL]

Cancer isn't like a pandemic. Cancer multiply within a body; pathogens multiply within societies.

I disagree with "you can only surrender your rights once"; unlike life, rights can be won back. There's plenty of places on the planet in which you couldn't freely speak or assemble just a couple decades ago, but now you can. Things aren't going monotonically from bad to worse (though I admit, there's a strong directional pressure here; maintaining rights feels like fighting entropy).

I am a parent, I want my child to live in a world where the government doesn't abuse and spy on them, but where that government is also capable of containing an infectious pathogen (whether natural or purpose-made) pretty much as soon as it registers. There is a practical balance to be found there.

(And if we're trading imaginary worlds: I want my child to live in a world where private entities don't spy on them and sell private information, a world where adtech doesn't exist.)

[teddyh]

This is like saying “There are no atheists in foxholes.” People who say it might believe it, but it is demonstrably false.

[throwanem]

I'm sure there are a few!

[buzzkillington]

>I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying.

Already had the virus, it was a bad cold.

Liberty or death.

[seph-reed]

> I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying.

The weak ones we shouldn't be prioritizing over the strong. Harboring weakness is just asking to be taken advantage of. It may seem empathetic at first, but all you end up doing is undermining the individuals growth and selling out the security of future generations. If you're an adult, you need to come to terms with death, and recognize that extending your life isn't worth stealing from future generations. They deserve more freedom than we've had. Not less.

[throwanem]

It's a mercy you won't be held to this when you get sick, and find it's somewhat easier to talk in the abstract about coming to terms with death than to face the imminent possibility.

edit: Well, you won't be held to it assuming we haven't reached a need for sufficiently severe triage, I suppose. Otherwise, you might get a chance to quite literally put your life on the line for the principle you've just espoused! I wish you joy of it.

[dang]

Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar. We ban accounts that keep doing that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Proziam]

All the soldiers, firefighters, and doctors/nurses/EMTs (and many more) are putting their lives on the line for what they believe in. Some of them believe in the constitution and some of them simply desire to help their fellow man. Not everyone is so weak that they sell out others for their own benefit, and assuming the worst of others only serves to expose your values, or lack thereof.

> I wish you joy of it.

That was straight-up evil. Whatever empathy and respect you may have had just went out the window. I'm almost in disbelief that you would edit your post just to literally wish someone the "joy" of having a chance to die.

[dang]

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. You've done it repeatedly in this thread. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong or bad another comment is, or you feel it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[throwanem]

"The weak should be winnowed from the strong, that the strong may prosper without being held back" is an idea that attracts your sympathy, though?

[buzzkillington]

>It's a mercy you won't be held to this when you get sick, and find it's somewhat easier to talk in the abstract about coming to terms with death than to face the imminent possibility.

It's unfortunate that you're a coward.

Death is not something to fear, and with a stock of strong pain killers neither is dying.

[dang]

Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments here generally. You've done it repeatedly, and we've already asked you not to.

[throwanem]

Sure, assuming you have the good fortune to choose your manner of dying. I wouldn't feel very comfortable making that kind of assumption. But I concede it's easier to sling accusations of cowardice than to think seriously about drowning slowly and helplessly in the fluids of your own destroyed lungs.

Congratulations on having gotten over this pandemic virus. Good luck with the next one!

[jshevek]

Reflecting on how my relationship with death has varied with my life experiences, I don't think you know enough about his particular experience to call him a coward.

[cjbprime]

> 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.

It's fine, but as Jean Yang pointed out on Twitter, no-one would ordinarily call disclosing everyone you'd shared a location with over weeks "privacy-preserving". And once you've done it for some large fraction of infected people, you end up with a country-wide social graph built up, even though you weren't conducting mass surveillance in the usual meaning.

It's a loss of privacy either way (whether done via location or Bluetooth contact). I'd rather just have the conversation about how we've decided to suspend physical metadata privacy to combat the pandemic, than act like the Singapore model is going to preserve it.

[monadic2]

> Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic?

Why does this imply such invasive measures?

[hw]

Would you then advocate for mandatory contact tracing in perpetuity, for purposes of preventing / solving crimes?