[jetanoia]

how would 'counter-terrorism' phone-tracking strategies be employed for containment?...

are they actively recording all phones GPS movements so that later when someone tests positive for Omicron, they work back through that GPS database to see who else might have been exposed?

or perhaps screening text messages from telcos to identify symptomatic hotspots that will be pursued with 'random testing'?

or... ?

there must be countless ways to such tracking but I'm curious what methods are most likely, how broad is the scope (looking to identify individuals vs broader trends), and finally, what actions might they take? (forced quarantine, etc.)

[plmpsu]

As far as I can tell, they're collecting cellular data on all of us constantly and when someone tests positive, they match that cell to all those who were in its vacinity during the past x days. I.e., this is more of a 'flipping a switch' for a cell model (hoping that a switch exists...).

Once you're cell is matched, you get an SMS stating the fact and that you should self quarantine (pending time or tests, not sure). Someone might check up on you to make sure you're quarantining and if police check your details when walking outside they'll issue a 5000nis fine.

[fy20]

How granular is this tracking data? I'd imagine anything more than 10-20m would produce too many false positives.

[montblanc]

mostly this. The "counter terrorism" is a bit of a click-bait. There's no NSA type surveillance with sophisticated machine learning algorithms going on (these are unneedded), its simple tools any police department in any modern country has and uses.

[morsch]

Collecting and keeping this data isn't something any police department is capable or permitted to do. Network operators don't just pass along their complete cell tower logs to the authorities. At least not where I live.

[montblanc]

> Network operators don't just pass along their complete cell tower logs to the authorities

They do under a judge's order, a lot of murder cases or other heavy crime cases are solved that way. The data is collected probably for these reasons or other emergencies. It's possible that Israel is being more aggressive in using these measures but the ability to do this is trivial and I'm pretty sure the data is there in most countries. I don't know how much other countries use these ability though for Covid purposes though, it could be that they hold privacy as a higher value than tracking infected covid people.

[FDSGSG]

> There's no NSA type surveillance with sophisticated machine learning algorithms going on

Hold up, do you know something that the rest of the world doesn't?

E: My bad, didn't remember this particular story. Although it hardly describes "sophisticated" machine learning https://theintercept.com/document/2015/05/08/skynet-courier/

[robbedpeter]

What do you think they use the nsa datacenter in Utah for? Real-time tracking of cell phone voice, text, and data, probably global. All the best cool deep learning advances seen in public are probably in play, a lot of awesomely powerful open source software has been released since Snowden. Who knows what's been snatched and classified for their private enjoyment.

Thank god for stringent oversight and constitutional protections, right?

[montblanc]

I was only saying that tracking adjacent cellphones to find possible Covid carriers is low-tech. It's something that has been done since the 90s and Israel is definitely not some pioneer in the field. And it has not much to do with terrorism.

[pdoege]

No.

Carriers routinely back haul GPS data and angle data to geo locate users. At the time this information was batched nightly against transaction data provided by credit card (and other) partners in order to build customer profiles that can be marketed to advertisers.

Carriers in the USA provide this data to law enforcement for fees. This is a profit center at the carriers that I've worked for.

Some countries limit the commercial exploitation of this data, some require judicial involvement. I don't know of any country that does not avail themselves to this data.