| Yeah, you can't start by saying your personal obsession with misunderstanding this contact tracing scheme is more important than the worst crisis of both security and prosperity most people have witnessed in their lifetime... ...and then, in the very next paragraph, disown that comparison you just made to insulate yourself from any criticism. Adding that disclaimer is tantamount to acknowledging that this is indeed a political question. In doing so, the author has preemptively refuted his own attempt in the next paragraph to claim that it is preferable to argue this issue on purely technological grounds. This is a public health crisis that is killing hundreds of thousands of people and setting every economy on the planet back by maybe 20% to 30%, or the equivalent of close to a decade of typical growth, at least for the richer countries. "Politics" isn't a dirty word here: it's how societies try to chart some sort of sensible path through this. Because balancing competing objectives is the essence of politics, anyone single-mindedly focussed on just health, or just prosperity, or just "the open web" is guaranteed to be disappointed by what will happen, and will become even more cynical and prone to disparage the idea of "politics" in this manner. But it is so blatantly obviously impossible to ignore these issues that even he making that argument failed to pull it off even before he got started. Specific to this article, I can confidently predict that "politics" will matter to it in a very practical sense, in that the political process is going to completely ignore it. I mean, I kind of understand privacy concerns, even though I find them somewhat unwarranted, considering the rather elaborate scheme Apple and Google came up with to preempt them. And I do, in principle, care about the "open web". But even after reading this article, I haven't the foggiest idea what this contact tracing scheme has to do with the "open web". Last and definitely least: a similar, but lesser, point: Signing/crediting your pull-quotes
with your own name is cringy as hell.
--IAmEveryone
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