[falcolas]

> government agencies and law enforcement … to be honest, I have no idea why they should be interested, but surely, they will.

This one’s easy. Bob commits a crime. Police think there’s an accomplice. So, they use a contract tracing system to identify and start investigating Bob’s direct and second-order “contacts”.

Note - this is independent of the actual implementation, which does seem fairly secure against such uses. Still, I worry that given the public nature of the “infected” list, and that phones automatically add themselves to the list, there are some statistic correlations which could be made.

[adrianmonk]

> So, they use a contract tracing system to identify and start investigating Bob’s direct and second-order “contacts”.

If "identify" means to discover the identity of, I don't see how law enforcement can do that under the Google/Apple system.

Law enforcement can get Bob's phone. And it will have a list of all the pseudonymous ids it collected. They can pull that data, but what do they do with it? The ids aren't IMEI or phone number or anything. And there is no central database of them.

If you had the contact's phone, then you could get data off both phones and confirm whether they had been nearby. But if you're confirming a link between Bob's phone and someone else's phone, it means you already discovered the identify of the contact through other means.

It would be possible to build a central database of these ids through dragnet surveillance, but since they are stored locally only, that would require putting malware onto the entire population's phone to upload the ids somewhere.

[ilogik]

law enforcement already has location from cell tower data.

to be able to read the ids from contact tracing apps, they need to capture the phones and decrypt them, at which point there's probably more evidence to be found than some random ids

[dustball156]

Actually no and no.

Having been in the same cell (potentially several square miles) as the murder victim is not quite the same as having been in tracing distance (4m²).

That's quite a strong argument/pretense, why law enforcement would immediately lobby to get the system changed in their favor. Don't you agree?

[ilogik]

if you use an android phone, check this URL: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

that information is a lot more sensitive and a lot more useful to law enforcement. most people don't even know how much your location is being tracked.

the contact tracing framework by comparison, isn't really very useful for anything other that just that...contact tracing

[ilogik]

sure, they can lobby for that....they have been lobbying for backdoors since the 90s.

the way the contact tracing framework ACTUALLY works makes it doesn't really make it useful to them.

they could lobby to change it

they can lobby with or without the framework being implemented