Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by buboard on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:44PM (#23073679)

covid19 has become a buzzword factory. Politicians popularize terms like "herd immunity" , "crush the curve", "testing", "ventilators", "PPE" etc to appear to be doing something. "Tracing" is the next in line, but it's a total sham. No country has been able to contain the epidemic with bluetooth. And all the countries that manage the epidemic have first waited until they have very few cases , which can be traced manually, and they did isolation well. As long as there is a high number of active cases, tracing won't work.

So, it's good that apple+google are banning those apps because they would be useless and a damn spying vector.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by tobylane on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:52PM (#23073764)

Bluetooth is only really an option for Apple, not any iOS developer. Slightly different for Google, where Android lets background apps use Bluetooth. So no country has tried to use bluetooth in their apps. Other than South Korea it sounded like contract tracing had been abandoned.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by PaulKeeble on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:41PM (#23074228)

In South Korea, I suspect that the big difference is the specialist tracing teams they are using combined with the random testing of the public to find new potential sources really quickly. I am sure the app helps but it is probably not the route to normality. It requires thousands of contact tracing teams and high amounts of random testing on very low numbers to work, it is a small piece a combined set of policies that work together.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by azinman2 on Monday May 04, 2020 @09:13PM (#23075321)

Would you rather nothing be done? This is potentially a big deal way to automate at scale that has no precedent. It's impossible to say this will/won't work, as it's never been tried.

Perfect is the enemy of progress.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by buboard on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @04:12AM (#23077682)

This is not the opposite of nothing. It's not that phone tracking hasnt been tried, indeed it did not work where it was tried in e.g. in singapore, korea and no other country made it work. What did work, in multiple countries, is "bring the cases down to very low numbers, interview new cases, isolate aggressively". Perhaps they should focus on the latter 2.

> to automate at scale

If you need to track circulating viruses "at scale" you have already failed, as the apps are going to be popping up false positives left and right and you end up with the entire population individually quarantining themselves.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by artursapek on Monday May 04, 2020 @05:51PM (#23073751)

You seem to agree with Schneier! I'm with you, the whole premise is utterly useless. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-1...

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by chimprich on Monday May 04, 2020 @06:47PM (#23074276)

Schneier's a security expert, not an epidemiology expert. I don't think I'm going to put much weight in his opinion. The UK's epidemiology and behavioural teams have some confidence that this app will have an effect.

It doesn't need to be perfectly effective to be useful. Even a small reduction in R is very helpful.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by DanBC on Monday May 04, 2020 @08:32PM (#23075029)

To be clear: Sage thinks it will work, but we're not told who is on Sage not which of them think this will work.

For all we know this is Cummings not understanding any of the science.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by chimprich on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @04:00AM (#23077609)

For what it's worth, I was thinking of developing an app on similar principles a couple of months ago and I talked to at one of the Sage people. They were enthusiastic about it. There have also been papers modelling the effect.

I don't like Cummings' politics but he is a smart guy. I think he'd follow the science.

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Re:Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their c... by crushthecurve on Monday May 04, 2020 @09:30PM (#23075420)

We took a deeper look in an article linked in another comment on this thread.

One thing that's interesting to think about more deeply is how difficult it is to estimate proximity based on the combinatorial explosion of different hardware, individual device peculiarities, battery levels and environmental factors (walls, glass windows, partitions, ventilation).

The very limited data published appears like interesting preliminary field work which finds significant variability in signal strength across hardware, and rather than concluding proximity estimations are useful, ends in a plea for OEMs to release factory calibration data for their BLE implementations:

https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-calibration...

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