[gonehome]

> “ misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN).”

Your comment is case-in-point the kind of knee-jerk response that I was talking about.

Edit: You added the second part after I’d already responded. They developed a good model to do large scale contact tracing in a privacy conscious way. People rejected this with vague suggestions like your comment about how it could be changed to be the opposite of what they’ve developed. Most people didn’t understand how it worked at all or why the design was good.

As a result, worse less-privacy preserving methods are used.

[verroq]

If they can be forced to change whatever implementation they have by the government then it helps no one. It’s just giving them more information on top of all their existing data they already have on you.

[gonehome]

> “ If they can be forced to change whatever implementation they have by the government then it helps no one.”

They can’t be easily forced to change the implementation and their implementation reduces the risk of privacy problems. It’s designed explicitly to be effective without increasing that risk and without giving the government any individual’s information.

It’s worth reading the doc I linked.

[verroq]

And it’s a solution looking for a problem. No one wanted this. Not the people and not the government.

It doesn’t solve my problem because I will not use such an app, period.

It doesn’t solve the government’s objective of maximum data collection so they won’t use it.

The very idea of privacy conscious contact tracing is an oxymoron.

[avh02]

You underestimate how important it is to (most, competent) governments to keep their citizens alive and how unprepared they were caught in this. This solution (if used) was better than flying blind and cost these governments nothing. It's not fair to pretend a government would not welcome contact tracing as-is if it helped provide a tool to stop the spread. Not everything a government does is out to surveil you, they have to still provide some other functions.

After a lid is on things though - yeah, maybe. Maybe they'll try to flip this, but not while their pants are down.

[verroq]

Then why wasn’t it used? Surely all these governments all have heard of apple/google’s superior solution. Reality undermines this argument.

[avh02]

some waited, some didn't. I can't pretend to know why.

My personal guess/opinion is that those governments who's only objective was to get people isolated on exposure would at least have leaned towards the apple/google solution when it became available. Those who had ulterior motives (or had already rolled something out) would be less likely to wait for it.

One surprise for me here is Norway's initial implementation, which it later re-evaluated[1], you'll also see (at least at that point in time) that Bahrain and Kuwait did not. Bahrain even turned it in to a game show.

Edit: just to add, you'd see for example a place like Australia looking in to the solution once available, last paragraph here[2] - my opinion is that these countries do not feel threatened by their general populace, thus don't feel the need to turn everything in to a mass surveillance tool if they don't need to

[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/bahrain-kuwai...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-apps-t...

[gonehome]

> “ It doesn’t solve my problem because I will not use such an app, period.”

This is why I’d argue it should have been an OS update and you can’t opt-out (or at least default opt-in).

If you throw your phone in the trash so be it, everyone else will get privacy preserving exposure notifications. Paired with effective quarantine this may have stopped the spread and thousands of people who died might have lived.

You may want to throw your phone in the trash anyway since it gives away your location to the telecoms.

[Apocryphon]

Perhaps it would have given the Librem 5 and the PinePhone an unexpected fanbase, from all of those who refuse the forced update.