the idea that GPS/location services can tell whether you're meaningfully within 6' of another person when you're in say, the 2nd floor of a 10 story building, is very much yet to be demonstrated. that's the precision required here right? I mean the whole nightmarishly orwellian and infosec concerns notwithstanding, why both with an approach that will give you inaccurate data? walk into a supermarket/office building/restaurant/etc and open google maps, if you wonder what I mean.
I think what some of the Asian countries were doing is regarding tested positive people quarantined at home. Therefore, not needed to be very specific to see if that person leaves home.
Yeah, it doesn't need to be accurate. Erring on the side of too many contacts is what they're going for.
From the guy who passive aggressively coughs around families that are shopping for food to try to “teach them some kind of lesson”, then posts about it like a 13yr old girl on the internet.
Go towards the light.
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sure, and that's fine. but that is explicitly NOT what the UT app is for. getting people to surrender their GPS location to try to solve a problem that GPS can't solve is pretty bad, imo.
in this particular case as in many others I suspect someone just swindled our dumbass state government into buying something that won't work... it's still a privacy concern though. doubly so if there is no meaningful positive tradeoff.
I think I've talked about this, but I've worked with cell phone location data. Data provided by OS and/or carrier, not third party apps. Unless you always have your location turned off (I do most of the time), your location is constantly being collected and is probably being sold. It's anonymized, but we've shown that it's not terribly difficult to determine individuals behind all those coordinates.
Remind me. We'll send him a red cap and a Speedo.
yeah, we slowly keep losing privacy over time. but explicitly giving this information to the government under a false pretense (that it can help with contact tracing) and with the explicit goal of using this information to limit our abilities to be in public is a rather drastic step up eh? in the case of the UT app at least a system with no auditability, not vetted by security experts, no public visibility into how decisions get made, just a black box out of which the police can say "you have to stay home" seems like a big change to me anyway
yes and the entire point is: GPS is not suitably accurate on its own or in conjunction with other technologies to determine, indoors, whether 2 individuals are within covid-spreading distance. so why is it there at all? you can determine the whole thing via bluetooth only and spare us 1) the gross privacy invasion and 2) the giant infosec bullseye on your new datastore. even if you trust the intentions of every party involved, do you trust the security practices of the random developer who builds this app? in the UT case it's nobody especially reputable.
I guess I could consider myself "in the industry" as an RF Engineer designing cellular networks and hardware for 25 years now. I would not sign up for active tracing like this, but I guess my point is that if you have a mobile it's already too late and you're already signed up.
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