[chimprich]

This is one of those rare cases where you have to directly balance lives against privacy.

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.

[majewsky]

This is one of the few cases where more privacy might literally save lives, because people will be more inclined to install the app if the privacy is taken more seriously. There was a poll where Germans were asked if they would install a contact tracing app. Some 40% sayed yes outright. Another 40% said "only if privacy concerns are addressed". So you're looking at a potential 40% market penetration without proper privacy and 80% with, which greatly changes the impact the app can have on reducing the spread of the virus.

(Disclosure: I'm a member of CCC and chairman of a local chapter.)

[chimprich]

I suspect a large proportion of people would install it if requested to by their government.

"Please install this app to save lives. Don't worry, it collects less data on your movements than Google Maps."

[eternalban]

"Requested"? It is painfully obvious that this narrative will climax with highly reduced rights - such as freedom of movement; employment; any sort of "assembly" -- for individuals who elect not to use mandatory surveillance products. Pressure to conform will be enormous and applied from top and bottom (from hysterical/concerned bottom dwellers).

This drip drip of 'steps to take' by authorities and media is quite disingenuous: there have been multiple simulations into pandemics in the past 30 years and all these steps have been spelled out in various papers.

Here is one: www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/events-archive/2001_dark-winter/Dark%20Winter%20Script.pdf

(Grep for "freedom")

[Angostura]

Did you read the article?

[jklhwtoy]

This is one of the few cases where mandatory installation of apps will save lives, as seen in China/SK.

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.

[blub]

Where's the proof that installing an app saved any lives at all?

And anyway, our rights are anyway being temporarily but heavily reduced. I don't see why we have to also install this app, especially since having everyone wear a mask and washing one's hands would make the whole point of having contact with an infected person almost irrelevant.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

And that does not mean it is right; it just means it is status quo. And Germans have a good reason to dislike panopticons as some still remember Stasi.

Mandatory apps installation.. I guess that could be rolled out as most providers can and do have the ability to install stuff on your phone remotely.

That said.. what are the odds average person gets sufficiently annoyed by gvmt mandated apps and installs lineage?

[fwn]

> what are the odds average person gets sufficiently annoyed by gvmt mandated apps and installs lineage?

Won't happen to any meaningful degree. IMO if technologists fail to sensitize public discourse against the emerging dangers of surveillance tech now contemporary western democracies are probably about to be "disrupted".

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I am willing to disagree. If the app becomes annoying ( and it may very be ) people may adapt rather quickly. My example is that of SIM locking in the old country. It was a somewhat technical process, but people quickly adapted to it and learned how to remove it. The perception was that removal of SIM lock was beneficial.

Naturally, I could be wrong ( and has been about cellphones for a while now ). And then, my mom could barely handle switch from Whatsapp to Signal.

edit: coffee didn't kick in yet. added barely before handle

[usrusr]

If we'd want to go all in on mandatory apps it would be possible to create much friendlier lockdown controls than what we have now. For example instead of flat out forbidding access to recreation hotspots like parks it would be possible to ration access so that everybody can enjoy them occasionally but they never get too crowded. This would be completely unfeasible in a paper bureaucracy even outside a pandemic situation, but computers could easily do it. The missing "technology" to do that without also enabling police state is not so much crypto and blockchain (though something along those lines might certainly be part of it) but social achievements like data protection laws and how to enforce them, processes to build trustworthy organisations and so on.

[Freak_NL]

Mandatory how? How will you address people without suitable devices? Not everyone has a (suitable) smartphone.

Making owning and carrying a smartphone with required app mandatory won't fly in any healthy democracy.

[chimprich]

You don't need everyone to have it installed. Just getting a large proportion of people to use it would likely have quite a significant effect in reducing infection spread.

One compromise in making it semi-mandatory could be to reduce lockdown requirements for people using and carrying the app, because they'd be less dangerous.

[Freak_NL]

That would be discriminatory, and run afoul of many constitutions and treaties. It could really only happen if anyone could get the device and required data bundle subsidized. “Less dangerous” is not enough to warrant such a huge breach in citizen's rights.

[shmel]

Really? 6 months ago I'd have said that putting the entire nation under house arrest won't fly in any healthy democracy, but here we are. Turns out no country is more democratic than China.

[atoav]

A friend of mine still uses a old Nokia from ~2009. Will he get a free smartphone? Who will check if he has it on him? What if he has it on it and the battery is empty? Or the screen is broken? What if suddenly everybody wants a free smartphone? What if suddenly everyone carries a broken old phone with them as a decoy with the police?

The answer to these questions is easy in a authotarian state: you assume they are bad actors and use the full force of the state on them – so people will go out of their way to do as if they comply with your rules even if they don't.

In any democratic nation with a culture of scepticism when it comes to the government it won't be that easy. If you force people to do things over here, you will get a considerable portion of people working actively against you in ways that you cannot prove. It might be easier, more efficient and fruitful to just make it voluntary.

[Freak_NL]

In increasing degrees of difficulty, how does a government get:

* people who own an Android or IOS smartphone to install a required app? (Might work if Google or Apple pushes the software, but does this outlaw non-stock-Android and IOS operating systems on a smartphone? Will Apple/Google do this for every country with an app?)

* people who don't own a smartphone to buy one? (Subsidized? Black-box devices that only need to be charged at home as an alternative for this group? How do you deal with people who don't want one for valid reasons besides privacy? E.g., people who got rid of them because they are vulnerable to the addictive properties of smartphone apps? And of course people who can't afford them.)

* people who can't use a smartphone to carry one around? (The digitally or otherwise illiterate or mentally incapable, and people with physical limitations won't just disappear overnight. This includes many elderly; exactly the weakest group with this virus.)

[shmel]

Gradually. It will be used to provide your freedom back. Lockdown is still in place, but if you agree to use the app, you can go outside and chill in a park, maybe even meet up with family members (groups fewer than N). Then you can introduce checkpoints in public places (just like China did btw): wanna go to malls, cinemas or airports? Install the app. But no, you are not forced to do this. You can just sit at home if you'd like until the lockdown is fully lifted. But we can't tell you when it happens, nobody knows. Perhaps after everybody is vaccinated.

Surely, they can also add a smartphone-free version that is a huge pain in the ass to use. It checks the box "you can survive without smartphone", but makes it practically unreasonable.

It will be the same situation as with CCTV and bag searches nowadays. The vast majority of people will accept this as reality and perhaps even support this. London is full of CCTV and mostly people are okay with this because they believe it is for their own safety. Sure, you are not forced into this, feel free to live in mountains off-grid.

The bottom line is you just wait until the lockdown is normalized in people's minds and then reward them with freedoms if they agree to use the app. And 99% will be okay with this.

[adrianN]

At least in my country the overwhelming majority of the people fully supports the measures. How is that not democratic?

[atoav]

One could say as well: This is one of the few cases where not living in an open society where citizens have rights might save lives.

I wonder. Some of my friends don't own a smartphone. How will that contact tracing app run on their Nokia from 2010? Or will they get a smartphone from the state? How would you check if someone owns a smartphone, or whether they are pretending to have one of the old ones? If your goal is to get as many installations as possible on devices people take with them is it really the most productive thing to try forcing it?

Don't get me wrong, I do realize that propper contact tracing is the only way to deal with this virus until we got a vaccine, but I don't see how a mandatory app installment could be enforced in any western state without breaking fundamental rights. You'd literally have police knock at doors and force people to unlock their phones in order to check the installed apps, if you really want it to be installed everywhere. You would have to stop people in the street and have them show you their device AND frisk them to make sure they are not showing you a decoy device with the line: "Ooops the battery went out" or "Ooops I broke it a few minutes ago".

No – in western democracies transparency and voluntariness carries much farther. If the CCC approved any contact tracing app, even I'd immidiately install it without hesitation. If however I had to trust a closed source app by a government which tried at every turn to legalize the surveilance state I'd probably not do it. If the state would force me to do it, I would actively work against it and help others to do the same.

[heurifk]

Your overthinking it, imagining that a large part of the population wants to be Jason Bourne. It doesn't matter if 1% will evade this (you and your friends).

But you show exactly the bigger problem: the West is so individualistic, that it will rather have millions of deaths and economic collapse than a bit of privacy infringement over a number of months, again, everybody viewing himself as some sort of secret agent that the government is out to get at all costs.

Asian countries on the other hand understand that some time you need to make some real sacrifices yourself for the greater good.

[atoav]

I grew up in the alps on the countryside and I am thinking about people like my neighbour and my father. Other than them I do understand the reasoning behind contact tracing, while they don't. If they were forced to use such an app they would work against it just out of defiance. And they are by no means special people. They have no idea about computers, they are more or less center conservative or center left.

Especially in the german speaking parts of Europe the scepticism towards government data collection has historical roots that I probably don't have to elaborate on, with people who died from said collection still in living memory. While safety is a fundamental right, it doesn't outweight all the other fundamental rights automatically. These rights need to be balanced even (and especially) in times of crisis.

I think the right way here would be to follow the CCC recommendations, and make it about a voluntary utilitaristic action, rather than enforcing it from the top down. People have to want to do it, just like they did in China. How you will get them there is different in Europe however.

[y7]

This is not an all-or-nothing scenario. The choice is not between an app that saves lives and compromises privacy, or no app and lives lost. Privacy preserving technologies exist, and now is the time to use them.

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.

[chimprich]

> There is an additional technological cost

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.

[black_puppydog]

We don't have enough runway to care about privacy, we'll just un-collect all that data once we raised!

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I buy this now as little as I buy it in other situations.

[ThreeFx]

That's maybe true, but giving governments the possibility to create movement profiles of people and correlate them is extremely dangerous. Maybe your current government is liberal enough to forego using the political aspect of the tracking app, but you can never be sure that this stays the case. What about governments with authoritarian regimes?

Finally regarding Google/FB: Why would you give up even more of your privacy?

[chimprich]

> What about governments with authoritarian regimes?

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.

[tinus_hn]

It is not relevant what would be required. It is only relevant what’s actually in there.