I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy - I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. Basically, I can trust specific people if I feel that I know their character, and by proxy I might trust a company that these people have significant control over. Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic levels, and even founders' altruistic motivations tend to fade or get drowned out by the basic profit motives of an increasingly large group of shareholders. At that point, it's not a matter of trusting, it's at best a matter of recognizing if the strategic goals of the company aligns with my interests in specific ways. For example Apple has made a strategic choice to double down on privacy, because invading privacy is not core to their business the way it is to Google and Facebook, so this allows them to gain an edge over their rivals. Great, that's something. That doesn't mean I "trust" Apple the way I would a person - it's more akin to how I'd recognize when a wild animal doesn't view humans as prey, so I'm willing to get relatively close to them without protective equipment. I don't trust them in general, I don't expect them to care about me at all, but I trust them to follow their instinct, which is to not attack me unprovoked.

I’ve thought for a while that trademarks should be non-transferrable, and should be voided on change-of-control of a company. Their primary purpose is to let the consumer know the origin of goods, and to allow companies to build a reputation around intangible properties of their products, like longevity, quality, and craftsmanship. Selling a trademark is fundamentally betraying that trust in exchange for a monetary reward, which wouldn’t be acceptable behavior in other settings.

Very interesting. Is this your own idea or has it been more widely discussed?

I don't recall hearing it from anywhere, but it's the sort of idea I'd expect to crop up from time to time. I haven't done any research to find out if anyone else has seriously suggested or investigated it.

Would you consider company going public as change-of-control that should trigger voiding trademarks?

Defining what represents a change-of-control is probably the trickiest part of moving this from an interesting idea to a real proposal. Probably, the key factor should be whether or not the senior management and/or the board membership stays essentially the same; new management should be required to earn their own trust from customers that might not follow company news.

Realistically that means no brand lasting longer than about ten years, and the total elimination of lots of century-old brands that people have fond relationships with. It's a stupidly excessive hammer that fails to address the real problems. And it's probably going to suffer the obvious free speech challenges.

> lots of century-old brands that people have fond relationships with.

That's the problem being discussed--the fond relationships are built with entities that no longer exist, and it is argued that current brand practices are deceiving for the consumer side of the relationship and abusive on the producer side.

"Free speech" is a ridiculous charge to level at this. The concept of a government-protected trademark is itself a restriction on free speech in the first place, as are all consumer-protection labeling laws.

> senior management and/or the board membership stays essentially the same

Defining "essentially the same" sounds hard, especially if a series of "small" changes happen over a period of time. Ship of Theseus, anyone?

A series of small changes gives consumers time to react and the value of the brand to naturally evolve, so arguably that's not a problem.

>so arguably that's not a problem.

As soon as you try defining "small changes" and the period of time on which they can occur, it is arguably a problem that will lead to loopholes easily abused by the legal departments of any big corp.

The purpose here is also likely to be very different for different use cases. You might not want the Apple trademark to be transferable as the management changes because you care about their approach to privacy. On the other hand, a consumer who thinks Diet Coke is tasty probably doesn't want to have to look up what brand name they were forced to change to when the CEO quit just to keep buying their favorite soda at the grocery store.

The purpose of trademarks is to capture value for their holders, not consumers. That it is why it is the holders who are awarded damages.

That's a brilliant proposal.

I kind of disagree with this. If a company publicly claims to follow certain principles and vows to have mechanisms in place to protect user privacy, people on the inside are able to judge if those principles are being followed. The larger a company is, the lower are chances that everyone would stay silent in case of a (systematic) breach of those principles. So in a sense, it's much harder for larger companies to secretly do things simply because larger groups of people are worse at keeping secrets.

If we were to outlaw NDA's and dramatically beef up whistleblower protections for corporate whistleblowers, that might work. But those are wildly implausible proposals! And while people are bad at keeping nefarious conspiracies secret, they're quite capable of keeping quiet in general - which happens to protect the less egregious but more relevant kind of grey-area, pushing the boundaries that slowly evolves. Just look at all kinds of corporate and governmental malfeasance stories to see that it's pretty normal for ethically dubious behavior to go on for years if not decades before it comes out. Most of it probably never comes out.

People can't keep crazy conspiracies secret very well, but are completely capable of keeping eroding standards quiet.

But history has proven this wrong. e.g, how did the entire German population wilfully engage in something that they now consider very wrong and ashamed about (WW2)?? (Quite a generalisation I know, but it's an example of a lot of people going along with something they may not entirely agree with, not comparing Apple to the Nazis BTW, nor am I saying that every single person went along with it).

I am merely saying that if it is possible at a national level, it is possible at a company level. If it is a culture where you work you can quickly become swept along with it.

WWII is somewhat different in that it was not secret what was happening. Speaking up on the inside is a much bigger step than just talking to outsiders.

What? The Holocaust was definitely kept under wraps from the general public until the concentration camps finally got liberated. Sure, some members of the public heard rumors, but it wasn't like Nazi Germany was doing it completely out in the open.

> The Holocaust was definitely kept under wraps from the general public

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard suggests otherwise.

For example, in a huge company lie Boeing it would be impossible to have a coverup of gross violation of the corporate principle of safety first, and as a consequence no one will ever be killed by a 747 Max 8 simply falling out of the sky taking hundreds of lives.

> The larger a company is, the lower are chances that everyone would stay silent in case of a (systematic) breach of those principles

that's wildly wrong hypothesis. the complete opposite of these ideas are uncontested knowledge in academia, and in popular culture as well.

see Hannah Arendt's work. (which doesn't even include profit and personal gains!)

It just strikes me as funny that in response to an argument against trusting large companies with sensitive information you say that "larger groups of people are worse at keeping secrets". I mean, isn't that just corroborating GPs point?

But the proposed solution in the U.K. and Australia is worse for privacy and is only subject to the scrutiny of the citizens of that country compared to the scrutiny of the entire planet for Apple and Google. Ultimately, if you don’t trust them, don’t take your phone out with you. Because any one of Apple, Google, Amazon, Huewai, Samsung or whoever could start tracking you with a simple software update at any time. Likewise don’t drive a car made in the last few years.

Correct. I'm an avid Apple product user (a dozen Apple products in the house actively used at the moment), but it's obvious that "privacy" was a PR push against rivals that had little or no impact on their bottom line.

If Apple relied on private info for revenue, the warm smile would be the same but the wording would be very different.

Still, the problem is more along the axis of technology. Even if Apple open-sourced their entire stack, we'd still have to take their word for what was running on our phones at any given moment. Encryption protects us but also ensures we can't know what information is sent from our phones to Apple. Hardware security, which protects us as well, turns our phones into a black box.

Are Apple good guys? Well, we could have a whistleblower come forward with evidence that they're not but a lack of whistleblowers isn't evidence that they are. If the entire stack isn't auditable by 3rd parties then we're just going on faith.

Personally, I'm ok with it. I like the aesthetics of Apple products more than their rivals. The threat to me, if it exists, isn't large enough for me to worry about.

If I were a criminal, I wouldn't trust my iPhone for a second.

>a lack of whistleblowers isn't evidence that they are.

It is, actually. It reduces the number of possible worlds in which Apple is an evil company, while leaving intact the number of possible worlds in which it is saintly.

It's only weak evidence, to be sure.

+1

Well put. Corporations aren’t people no matter what Citizens United “says.” Their goal is maximizing shareholder profit at any cost. They do nothing out of the goodness of the hearts they don’t have and they certainly are not guided by ethics the way individuals are.

As you said, if Apple “cares” about privacy more than Google or Facebook it is not because it is a more “moral” or “just” company, it is simply because its business model is not, and never was, based on hoovering up and monetizing personal data.

It’s not like a conscious decision was made by Tim Cook or Apple’s shareholders to do things differently than the aforementioned two companies.

Pointing out how Apple “cares about your privacy” is simply a PR (read: propaganda) move designed to gain some extra positive publicity which, of course, helps the bottom line. It’s the kind of thing companies do all the time. Taking these pronouncements at face value requires a certain naïveté (or a wilful suspension of disbelief).

And while Apple might not traffic in its customers’ personal data, the company recently revealed that it scans content stored on its servers, e.g. your iCloud Photo Library, because of “concerns” over child pornography.

This suggests privacy isn’t quite as sacred to Apple as its PR department would have one believe.

(Never mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that mass surveillance reduces incidence of child sexual abuse or decreases the production and distribution of child porn. Which begs the question, why <i>is</i> Apple spying on its paying customers’ personal content?)

Whenever a company, or a government, deploys the cliché “think about the children!” argument as a pretext for increasing internet surveillance, you can bet this reason was chosen because if anyone objects on privacy grounds they can say, “what, so you’re on the side of the child pornographers/suicide trolls/cyber bullies?” It’s a discussion stopping tactic.

Yeah, corporations are definitely not people, they are not your friends and they do not care about you as a person. That in 2020 this even needs to be said is a testament to how thoroughly corporate propaganda has been woven into the fabric of western culture.

> Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic levels, and even founders' altruistic motivations tend to fade or get drowned out by the basic profit motives of an increasingly large group of shareholders.

I couldn't agree more. But at the same time, I'm completely baffled that while this sentiment about companies is widely agreed upon on HN, people around here don't expand this from companies to much more powerful and dangerous orgs: governments.

Regarding Apple's relationship with privacy, I implore you to take a gander at these pages:

https://apple.com/privacy (45 second read)

https://apple.com/privacy/features (many minute read with links to whitepapers)

I believe this goes well beyond following instinct, and at least for me does lead to a strong semblance of trust.

They really did a doozy by not being upfront about Siri's contractors (I already knew so it didn't affect me personally), and they're hemming on E2E iCloud backups (perhaps for Availability, perhaps for China), but they continue to push the envelope on what usable security and usable privacy looks like.

In addition; the iPhone 5s from 2013 is still getting security patches, as recently as March 24th.

> I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy

I'd go the reverse. The bigger they are, the more I trust them.

> I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way.

But anybody who trusts them for that reason is indeed crazy.

Maybe out definition of trust is different. For me trust means predictability. Do I trust the sun will rise in the east or a stone will roll down the hill? Do I trust my mother will tell me off if I growl at my sister? Do I trust my father will ask me how the finances are going? These things are all predictable - so I trust them. To a lesser extent do I trust these people to keep their word? The answer is sometimes - if my mother promises to look after the kids then definitely, but if she promises not to buy them presents then I'll trust her a little less.

Companies are also predictable in some ways. Bigger companies more so than smaller ones, simply because it takes a lot longer to change the direction of a bigger ship. In my book predictable means trustworthy.

One of the things you can absolutely have faith in is a bigger company is driven by money. (A small company is more likely to be driven by idealism of its owners.) Money means users, so if a good record on privacy attracts users you can be pretty sure they will do their best to have a good record. Not surprisingly Apple and Google do have an extraordinarily good record on keeping data they store secure - far better than most governments for example.

It does not surprise me at all both companies are making a song and dance about how they are safeguarding your location data, and I trust them to do everything within their power to make good on that promise. Unfortunately they aren't gods - if they receive a court order to cough it up, they will. So trust has limits.

> I'd go the reverse. The bigger they are, the more I trust them.

that is just silly.

> bigger company is driven by money

Follow that money. Figure out who pays. Are you the customer?

That's a good writeup and a good practice.

Agreed. When it comes to corporations and privacy the rule of thumb is guilty until proven innocent.

There's a world of difference between projecting onto a non-living entity the properties of an animal, or those of a human - so I don't understand why you think what I did was an anthropomorphism. And I find the analogy to animals quite apt to be honest: Humans can have all sorts of motivations, including morality, and if you know that about a person, you can trust them. By comparison, wild animals (at least excluding primates, whales and dolphins) are driven almost exclusively by much simpler motivations, such as getting food or procreating, much the same way large companies are driven simply to generate profit and shareholder value. I don't need to trust a shark, but I can trust it to follow it's shark instincts. I don't need to trust companies, or expect them to care about me, but I trust them to care about their bottom line.

So to be clear: I'm glad Apple and Google are going this route, rather than allow governments to massively track their citizens. And I don't need to trust Apple in order for that to happen, and that's good.

I totally missed your point in the original post. Apologies for that! It seems others didn't. I agree with you.

I've long felt like Apple is uniquely easy to distrust, due to its almost total lack of visible employees. I assume there are actual people working there, but I've never seen one, say, speak (openly) at a meetup or answer a stackoverflow question, or the like. ~Everything I know about Apple either comes from an advertisement or from a guy who talked to a guy who talked to Gruber, and I have a feeling that that makes it easier for people to assume nefarious behavior behind the scenes.

Actually, with the exception of people working on standards committees, I think your comment may be the first time I've ever seen an Apple employee openly comment in a public forum.

Yep, I think this is quite right. In fact my first thought after seeing this guy self-identify was "welp, that guy's getting fired"

Yep, same thoughts.

Most of the open-source contributors in my projects that get hit by a bus, get hit by an Apple's bus (they start working at Apple, and cannot say anything publicly anymore or contribute to any project).

I've met an Apple employee at a conference, just once. Talking to him was reminiscent of talking to an employee of GCHQ (which I have also done). Relaxed and affable, but wielded the phrase "I can't tell you that" with the familiarity of one who says it several times a day.

Sounds about right. A pretty good friend of mine worked at Apple for a year or two, and I once asked if he enjoyed his time there. He answered: "no comment".

The general populace generally doesn’t pay any attention to any statements from any employees of any company. Those in the tech industry generally don’t pay any attention to statements from any employees of any company outside the tech industry. Being aware of statements from employees does not appear to be a factor in terms of trust in a company.

I read GP's post (and hence my reply) as being about sentiment here on HN. Obviously I agree that the general public's opinion of Apple isn't heavily influenced by meetup speeches and Gruber's blog :P

I’ve seen an Apple engineer in non-GUI or hardware job talking on his blog about curvatures he encounter over the course of his job, so that definitely happens sometimes.

Their infamous secrecy doesn't exactly help either.

Well there's WWDC of course. But I suppose that's not really "out in the world".

Do you find companies with public facing employees that give talks at meetups and conferences easier to trust?

In other words, you trust Facebook, Google, NSA, and Congress more than Apple?

Seems like an odd standard.

I said P⇒Q; you're asking if that means I believe !P⇒!Q.

That is: I'm not saying a company is trustworthy if-and-only-if its employees speak publicly. I'm saying that my mental model of what a company would or wouldn't do internally is strongly influenced by what I know about its employees.

The alternative is that you believe !P⇒Q, in which case you could have easily just said Q

What if there's an R?

As an Australian who has privacy concerns their government's COVIDSafe app (see https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing), and hence not installing it, I'm really thankful that Apple and Google are pushing this model of contact tracing. We still don't know if digital contact tracing is effective in practice, but it's still important to try, but we can do this in a way that avoids giving governments with worrying authoritarian tendencies another tool.

Having Google/Apple develop a tracking technology is the same as the US government having it. If you don't believe, read again what Snowden revealed several years ago.

What? I don't think this is accurate.

From what I recall, the US was/is spying on the major tech companies and would regularly demand data and place gag orders on those companies.

Neither actions are willful forms of data transfer. The first is actually an eternal game of cat and mouse. NSA finds a leak for some data, Google fixes it, new leak, etc. The second is targeted handover of data, and only affects a few individuals.

Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading. If you think otherwise, please provide more detail.

Exactly why they aren’t collecting GPS data and the system is built using anonymous Bluetooth keys, similar to the find my iPhone anonymous network. Can’t hand over what you don’t have.

How does this jive with Google, for instance, using Bluetooth scanning (enabled by default) for high location accuracy? This has been enabled for years and most people are simply aware of it being enabled (outside of HN).

Google has effectively been using Bluetooth scanning and contact tracing (of sorts) as part of their location tracking feature... Now they're turning around and saying they won't track location from Bluetooth scanning? Seems like a BS PR move.

Apple and google are working together on this. So it’s an agreement between them both to have a more privacy-centered protocol for this purpose.

Google lets you do a lot more privacy violation on Android, but Apple has been building their brand around privacy and wouldn’t participate in that.

>Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading. If you think otherwise, please provide more detail.

By everyone you mean "US citizens" because from my understanding non-US citizens are fair game and it it legal to spy on them.

No, they aren't allowed to hand over data on EU citizens either, that would break GDPR. USA wouldn't go after them for this but EU definitely would.

What about non EU citizens? Do you think NSA won't try to get the realtime location of EU and nonEU politicians? They can claim is for national security, would GDPR stop that?

You should maybe read Permanent Record from Snowden. Everything you describe is outdated since his whistleblowing in 2013.

> is spying on the major tech companies and would regularly demand data and place gag orders on those companies.

So you agree.

> Neither actions are willful forms of data transfer.

What’s that got to do with it?

> Equating these with the US government having full access to everyone's data is misleading.

If the data exists, the only prudent approach is to assume state-level actors, at least, can get access to it.

The discussion is beyond "if the data exists", it will be gathered and some people seem to prefer yelling at clouds instead of looking at the technical implementation.

Even nation state actors will have a harder time gathering data that only exists locally on a bunch of smartphones, separate from geolocation as proposed here, versus a centralised database lacking comprehensive oversight.

The rest is pretty irrelevant, we're talking about data collection using phones that already have an OS from both of these vendors. "But Snowden" is really no argument anybody in these discussions will listen to (and I'm not convinced they should if it's used in a way to imply that you shouldn't use the internet for anything). If you have a problem with data collection for contact tracing please be specific why and optimally provide what you feel would be a better alternative.

Google and Apple are the ones pushing for isolating where this data lives and how it can be used/abused here. They are doing this in an effort to curb far more dangerous data collection on the very same devices in architectures that infer location or send off all data that is gathered on central servers. Your comment boils down to "Gapple is evil because Snowden" and seems to be disconnected from the specific issue at hand. They are OS manufacturers, if they wanted to get malicious access to all kinds of tracing data they would have had to do exactly nothing.

> They are doing this in an effort to curb far more dangerous data collection

Don't be naïve. This is not an NGO or an institution. They are doing this so that they and noone else owns the data.

Or maybe so that ordinary people will continue to to trust them and people like me will start trusting them.

They have a long way to go in my case but every journey starts with a single step, and this seems like the twelfth or so step from Googles side towards becoming trustworthy (but they still have a long way to go!)

I think one shouldn't underestimate the business value of actually being a trustworthy vendor/business partner/SaaS company and while there are a few contenders that niche isn't too crowded for now :-)

> Don't be naïve. This is not an NGO or an institution. They are doing this so that they and noone else owns the data.

Even if this "do your research" level talking point would be true, they don't own the data in this proposal, the end user device does. The device you trust and use anyway, the device that has your geolocation and access to far more data Gapple could abuse at all times. Which is better than what the COVIDsafe/NHSX/ROBERT put forward for the specific topic of digital contact tracing.

Google/Apple developed this particular contact tracing technology such that they don't have any of the data nor any of the control, so it is not the same as the US government having it.

> Having Google/Apple develop a tracking technology is the same as the US government having it.

This is why you want an API that never uses any data you don't want anyone else to have. That's what this API is.

The "trust" here isn't about whether they'll keep your data safe from third parties including state level actors. Your "trust" only needs to be that the API does what it says on the tin.

Which leads to this conclusion: either you A) trust this API to be what it says: something that doesn't ever deal with any sensitive data. Basically an exchange of random numbers.

Or B) you think that there is something nefarious here and the API might associate who you are or where you are, and store or distribute that data.

If it's A) then you should be fine. If you think B) then you shouldn't use a phone from Apple or Google. Because as far as you are aware, they share your location and personal information.

As far as integrity goes, I can't see a situation where you would both accept running an iOS or Android phone but at the same time avoid apps with this API out of privacy concerns!

> then you shouldn't use a phone from Apple or Google

Because you have another choice...

I read Snowden's biography - Permanent Record. Your claims are untrue. The sibling comment has it right - the US govt could steal data from the tech giants but they gradually got better at plugging such leaks. For example, in response to the Snowden revelations, all data in transit between datacenters is now encrypted. On the other hand, the govt would also request the data of a few people, which was generally granted.

It's not correct that the US govt has root access to all systems and data.

That seems extraordinarily naive. The NSA would not give up access like that unless forced at gunpoint, and the US gov has clearly demonstrated it doesn't care (and actually quite likes) this sort of gross privacy invasion.

The only (in)tangible difference between 2005 and today is the presumed existence of national security letters and other warrants that compel these companies to provide access.

You must be ignorant of how these agencies work. All they want is plausible deniability. The spy agencies have all technology needed to access any phone. For example, it is widely known that Israel's agencies have the ability to enter any phone, iOS or Android, and get the information they want. They are now OPENLY using this technology to track corona virus cases:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/tech/israel-coronavirus-techn...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tech-company-says-it-c...

Do you recall the news that NSA (US Intel Agency) paid RSA (US security vendor) $10m go backdoor encryptions libraries?

If this was exposed once it’s happening elsewhere.

There was also the case of the NIST elliptic curve encryption best practices being subverted for NSA backdoors standard.

They’ve got a job to do. They’re doing it. But worth noting that a vendor could claim be pro privacy while also cooperating with their government.

And we also have examples of companies refusing to comply. And we all use djb’s curves rather than the nist curves now.

Another consideration that seems to have been obscured by the debate on privacy and the narrow focus on the particular client implementation of the app is the significant problem of false positives and negatives.

A lot of voices have spoken out about this issue overseas (particularly in the US) while many local tech voices have skipped considering this at all.

See:

* Previous FTC CTO / Obama Whitehouse senior adviser: https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/1248659875669798912

* Brookings Institute article: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/inaccurate-and-insecure...

* Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University (pdf report): https://healthpolicy.duke.edu/sites/default/files/atoms/file...

* Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-1...

We need to be driving test numbers up until only 3-5% are showing positive in order to be confident about low prevalence in an area. I don't see a problem with false positives encouraging asymptomatic people to get tested - it's as good of a sub-population as any.

The project lead of Singapore's TraceTogether initiative goes into detail about the problems with an automated system, and why a human-in-the-loop is ideally required to evaluate the type of contact and make a determination.

A determination around being a close contact results in 14-day isolation regardless of symptoms, presumably because you may initially test negative before moving into an infectious and asymptomatic or symptomatic phase.

https://blog.gds-gov.tech/automated-contact-tracing-is-not-a...

It's worth re-iterating how unreliable bluetooth signal strength is in estimating proximity.

One recent data point using the CovidSafe app is here: https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1256199078314078210

Exploration around the defects in that app is ongoing here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u5a5ersKBH6eG362atALrzuX...

14 day isolation was a policy choice. There is no reason that other municipalities do the same. We can discover a balance that keeps local r < 1.0

I assume that the use model is as a way to help human contact tracing, not to replace. Admittedly, the benefit is less then, but maybe it's still worth it?

The assumptions of benefit appear to rely on a naive theory of instantaneous contact and isolation, when in practice the entire process is unavoidably manual, requiring human intelligence to ascertain environmental factors with which to make a determination about whether someone is a close contact.

When you consider that close contacts include anyone you've spent more than 2 hours with in a room, it becomes clear that most life situations are not handled by estimates of proximity using bluetooth: home, family & friend visits, workplaces.

You can find a deep-dive into these issues here:

https://blog.crushthecurve.today/why-should-you-install-the-...

There are two sides to trusting the covid-19 app. One is the technical side those people are commenting on. Technical deficiencies can be fixed, and more to the point will be fixed if you just keep shining some light on them as they are doing.

The other side is trusting the government to keep it's promises. During this covid-19 crisis I do trust them, but in the longer term their record of keeping promises has been less than stellar. Frankly, keeping this app or any app of theirs installed over a few years on the basis them promising not to missuse the data is downright foolish given their past history. Such promises tend to become null and void at the next election.

But right now we have no choice - it's either take them at their word, or don't install the app. Yes, we can do what the gang of four above have done and de-compile it, but that takes a huge amount of effort that has to be repeated every new release. That effort isn't going to continue. If it doesn't continue the light doesn't continue to shine on it's technical deficiencies, and so they won't be fixed.

But - that can change with a few simple and cheap changes to the way the government does things. All they have to do is release the source to a public repository before they release the binary and have a reproducible build. Do that lots of things become much easier. Checking what the commented source does as opposed decompiled output is much easier, checking just the differences in source between one version and the next is much, much easier than checking the entire thing, using reproducible build to allow you to check the source rather than decompiled output is very much easier. Do that, and the light on the technical deficiencies will stay on forever.

Implementing those inexpensive and straightforward things has anther wonderful emergent properties aside from the technical deficiencies being fixed: you suddenly don't have to trust the government, you can trust the code instead.

But no one seems to focus on changes to the overall process. Instead it's essentially nit picking on how the app does things today. It's an unfortunate focus.

COVIDSafe will be using these new APIs.

Have you got a link / source for this? Genuinely interested, not being a dick.

From what I heard it works fine on Android, but on iOS it works ok... as long as you have the app running in the foreground, and your phone unlocked, while out and about.

The only way to fix that would be to use this new API on iOS.

Since people seem to be downvoting without commenting: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/covidsafe-issues-ios-ipho...

I wasn't one who downvoted but parent post was asking for source on whether this app is going to utilize the new APIs, specifically. According to your subsequent link, near the bottom, currently it's unclear:

"The Government will work with Google and Apple to investigate whether the new functionality announced by Google and Apple partnership is beneficial for the app performance"

The COVID Safe app was already released (although not fully functional on the server side yet) but the Google and Apple APIs are not available yet, so doesn't that mean that it isn't using the Google and Apple APIs? At least currently, any way.

According to the Australian COVIDSafe app's privacy policy, when you register for the app, after you successfully enter a PIN sent by SMS, it transmits the following info to the Australian authorities: your mobile phone number, the name you enter, the age range you enter, the postcode you enter. The reasons for each are explained in the policy. This data is stored in the cloud. I don't see why the registration info (I'm just talking about the registration info, not the Blutooth-related data) can't simply be entered later, or stored locally on the device and not uploaded until, when and if, the user volunteers to share their registration info with health authorities, e.g. as a result of being notified that someone that was near them has tested positive for COVID-19. If this info wasn't transmitted as part of setting up the app, I expect the uptake of the Australian COVIDSafe app would be significantly higher.

I am also still waiting for Australia to publish the source code for their COVIDSafe app...

As a lifelong public servant, welcome to the ungrateful side of life. If you're providing a service to the public with the hopes of their gratitude, you will be sad. Do it for the same reason you change your baby's diaper: you love them and it needs doing. They might take pleasure in pissing on you while you're doing it, but this thing you love will be better off afterward.

Let's not compare apple to a public institution. What apple does is in the interest of the shareholders and nothing else.

>What apple does is in the interest of the shareholders and nothing else

Honestly what is with this attitude? Yeah, I get it.. you took a business class and learned that everything a company does should be to maximize shareholder value.

But welcome to the real world. Sure the company wants to make money, but they also want to provide a valuable service. Yeah sometimes making money gets in the way with the best product they could offer.

But it's people making the decisions of what to make. It's people who use the software (let's say osx/ios) that want to make it better. It's developers who sit there are think how can they improve this feature so it's great for people.

Perhaps the institutional shareholders have Apple holdings precisely because their privacy-centric practices increase their stability, independence, and profit—without having to sell out their customers.

No, they hold it just to get a return on their investment.

Actually I think the comparison is a good one, but mostly due to governments acting in their own interest rather than the interest of the people :)

It's nice to have some people like you, but a significant amount of public servants I encountered visibly took pressure in making the life of other's miserable, and the processes as convoluted as possible.

Some people in government want the government to succeed and make people's lives better. Some people in government want the government to fail in all ways besides keeping them and the people they like safe so they can personally benefit and pocket the tax savings on top.

> Some people in government want the government to fail in all ways besides keeping them and the people they like safe so they can personally benefit and pocket the tax savings on top.

and its much easier to make something fail than it is to succeed, which is why voting for (and keeping) the right people is so importamt

Were they aware that the process was convoluted, or did they simply not realise how obtuse they were making it?

I have worked with people who "designed" terrible systems or couldn't see that a system would never work, yet still attempted to operate it. It was like they were unaware of the dysfunctional state of it, yet it had to exist because their job was to "design".

This kind of dismissal of an analogy bothers me. It's quite common, most often just using the word comparing: "Are you seriously comparing this to ...???"

Analogies are a great tool for clarifying similarities and no, that doesn't mean that situation A shares every virtue or vice with situation B. If so, it wouldn't be an analogy, it would be the same.

Apple is a for profit corporation. They are literally the exact opposite of public servants.

Apple isnt a public company. Apply lives for profit. Apple is positioning themselves stratergically. Contact tracing is a vector for profit.

If the government doesnt misuse your data, Apple will, by proxy, buy training there AIs on your datas. Sure the AIs will start out "for the purpose of good" but at some point they will be leveraged for the "purpose of profit".

The anti-vax movement challenges science itself; the anti-Google/Apple movement challenges corporate-level ethics and human control over identity. You can independently reproduce experiments demonstrating the efficacy of medicine. You can’t reproduce the faith that you place in your own corporation.

But in this case the mechanics at play are the same: people can read the documentation and arrive at the idea that this protocol is actually good and much better than some alternatives.

Instead, they form an opinion based on generic distrust for apple and Google, just like no-vax people do it out of generic mistrust for institutions and big pharma.

While the protocol may be good, the app implementing it may be not. Google and Apple have gone to great length that you cannot control what's running on your device. The next update can be nefarious and you can do only little about it. Just have a look at the Australian assistance laws. The distrust is well earned.

but the next OS update can do whatever it wants too, how is this a change? We will always need independent verification and observation of the platform behaviour from the outside.

The distrust _is_ justified, and we should be wary. What is not justified is dismissing the CTF based only on that, imo.

While that might be an argument in general, the protocol Google and apple are working in is cryptographically secure. They provably can't back out data about you.

Is their code open source? How do you know this?

Yes.

https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/

A PDF document with a specification is not even close to "open source code". There is no way to know whether the specification actually matches the implementation.

> There is no way to know whether the specification actually matches the implementation.

That would be true even if Apple suddenly decided "oh these folks on HN want to see the code for that tracing component, better open source our complete OS". I've seen assurances that parts of this will be open sourced as far as they can but I honestly don't see how that matters. You have, as is a general tradition, a description of what this system does cryptographically. The rest is a matter of reverse engineering that hardly benefits from having the code. It's not like Play store updates or whatever Apple uses to push this are reproducible builds the end user can verify. And you always have the closed source blob of whatever BTLE chipset your device uses which you can mistrust.

edit: Let me qualify "but I honestly don't see how that matters" for the question of trust in what runs on your phone here. If you read a dig at OSS into this you're generalizing far over what I'm addressing here.

There are defiantly benefits from having the source code when it comes to being able to verify that the implementation does in fact match the specification. Sure, reverse engineering the binary would be possible but far more difficult. Reading open source code is far easier than reverse engineering. (Added in edit: From what I've read, the spec itself doesn't seem bad. The point is, assurance that does not require trust in another entity that the spec was implemented as written would drastically improve the confidence in the system.)

I have compiled some of the apps on my phone myself so I know that the result does in fact come from the same source code. That may not work in the case of iOS devices, though.

> And you always have the closed source blob of whatever BTLE chipset your device uses which you can mistrust.

That is a good point and it'd be great if that chipset could also be open sourced but one step at a time.

> That would be true even if Apple suddenly decided "oh these folks on HN want to see the code for that tracing component, better open source our complete OS".

You are correct if it was simply open sourcing the OS. If it was possible to compile and install the OS ourselves, that would completely change the game.

> but I honestly don't see how that matters

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

There is no code available at that link, and no indication whatsoever that Google and Apple’s implementation of the algorithms and protocols described in those documents will be open source.

I believe your claim is false.

Realistically, those APIs will be analysed soon after they're available in the same way COVIDSafe was. If they do something different than what's in the design, we'll know pretty quickly.

As a former Apple employee, it's gutsy for you to post this, or anything, certainly on a controversial topic.

You don't work for the kind of employer that values someone sticking their head out and saying ... anything. They want to control the message, and saying anything may be worse for both you, and for Apple, than saying nothing.

Just be careful. Apple's got the people to manage this PR situation.

As someone else commented, this is one of the reasons why trusting companies like Apple is a bad idea. Even if employees had real concerns about a technology, or wanted to discuss the pros/cons, we would never hear about it. It should be obvious why a strong focus on secrecy and "controlling the message" breeds distrust.

The appropriate venue to discuss concerns with technology in a forum that will actually impact it is rarely a public message board.

That does not imbibe more trust in me regarding the corporate world, Apple this time. Big corporates have done many things to erode it, just like governments did. As we all know, trust leaves on horseback, comes back on foot. And in current 'distrust-first' society with populism feeding the gut, it may not come back at all for quite some time.

> it's gutsy for you to post this,

That comment seems completely neutral. Not being able to post that comment without worrying about consequences sounds absolutely dystopian.

It's Apple, that's how it works. You've frequently got no idea what the person down the hallway is working on.

Yeah, there’s so little critical thinking going on in general.

I wish people really tried to understand rather than just give knee-jerk negative responses to go along with their existing world view.

A lot of people are trying to do the right thing and working hard to do good. The cynical HN default response just feels like a lazy way to try and signal intelligence.

Edward snowden, gag laws and the history of FBI/CIA is what any educated critical thinking person needs to understand why these apps should not be trusted.

Apple and Google may have good intentions. But if there is one thing clear from history is that if anything can be abused it will be. Maybe not now but it certainly will eventually.

Sure - and there are nuanced/interesting discussions that can happen about the risks, but that’s not what most of this commentary is.

Most of the comments are empty of any actual content from people who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on.

The protocol is designed by people aware and concerned about these risks (which is why the way it works is pretty interesting).

A lot of interesting work happens in the challenging areas where it’s critical to get things right, there are real risks, and the answers aren’t obvious. Engaging in those areas where things are complex is important.

It's easy to just remove yourself from the problem, say something can't be trusted, and then feel good about your moral purity, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. It does, and there is real value in putting work in to solve it.

If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it exactly because you're concerned about the risks.

Jeff Hammerbacher's quote from working at Facebook reminds me of this, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” I think he's right, and working on these bigger non-ad software problems is where the effort should be, because they are hard, and because the outcome is important.

The governments of the west need to be capable, but still protect the privacy of their people - that isn't an easy problem.

>The governments of the west need to be capable, but still protect the privacy of their people - that isn't an easy problem

You're right, it's a hard problem. And until these companies or institutions can prove that they are doing this, why should we trust them?

>who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on.

The companies will collect and store the tracking data, and the government will, one way or another, have access to it. What is so difficult to understand about that?

"It will only be used for good" is laughably naive, as history had demonstrated repeatedly.

>If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it

Protesting and making your opinions known is way to help solve the problem.

> The companies will collect and store the tracking data, and the government will, one way or another, have access to it. What is so difficult to understand about that?

It's difficult to understand because it's false (and this statement shows you haven't tried to understand the solution they are proposing): The data doesn't leave the phone without the user's consent, the consent is only asked for if the user contracts the disease, and the data uploaded when consent is given is only useful to those who have been in the vicinity of that user: the companies developing the system and the government do not get a list of users and their contacts (they get no data at all from anyone who does not consent, and they still don't get contact data from those who do).

The only issue of trust is whether the implementation on the phones matches their statements: but this is already a general problem with phones in general: if you are trusting them to run the OS you are already trusting they will not exfiltrate this and more data. I see no actual expansion in their powers through adopting this approach, and I see them making every effort to protect privacy while achieving the requirements, which is in stark constract to government approaches.

Thank you - the comment you replied to is basically a case in point of what I’m talking about.

> Protesting and making your opinions known is way to help solve the problem.

Not when the protesting and opinions are based on a false understanding that comes from motivated reasoning, knee-jerk negative responses, and not trying to understand the issue deeply.

Then it’s just noise that confuses the issue and makes things worse.

Most of the time it’s not helping to solve the real problem anyway. It just makes people feel good about themselves without actually engaging in the work.

> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process, the level of public harm becomes severe

This is not an accident. A great deal of work has gone into destroying public trust and the capacity of institutions to make impartial decisions based on data. Partly from the profit motive, partly for destructive political purposes. And a lot of people in the tech industry and on here actively support the right to destroy that work by posting the most thoroughly debunked and dangerous lies on popular tech platforms - again for their own ideological purposes.

Release the source code and provide some mechanism for users to have verifiable proof that the published code matches the application running on the device and we can start talking about trust.

Given past track record of both companies, this is the only way I would ever have of not being skeptical.

Do you have some evidence that Apple and Google run backdoors to privacy on iOS or Android devices? You speak about the track record of both companies, surely you should be able to point out several examples of this.

The spec seems pretty clear - it's not possible. If you feel that you don't trust them to implement the spec correctly due to incompetence or malice on their part - you need to supply the proof. If we're relying on your gut feel to be skeptical, you just look like an anti-vaxxer saying "I don't trust Big Pharma's vaccines based on my gut feel."

There's arguably a lot more evidence against Google than Apple here. But Apple did lie about their involvement, or even knowledge of, the PRISM program. Snowden leaks. I highly recommend Glenn Grennwald's book No Place to Hide if you're not interested in digging though sources yourself.

Even against their will, companies with capabilities can and have been compelled by government agencies to go against their promises and lie about it.

Additionally, with organizations of this size, it's very plausible that the vast majority of employees and even executives are blissfully unaware of wrongdoings, abuse and involvement in conspiracy by individual employees or decision makers.

All it takes is a single compromised or malicious person to add new capabilities in an update to an already rolled-out and well-intentioned software. Possibly a handful if you add strongly enforced and audited mechanisms for co-signing releases and whatnot.

I've read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. It doesn't get more detailed than that. There is nothing in the book that indicates that Google's implementation of the contact tracing spec would deviate from the spec either through incompetence or malice.

You're making vague, unsubstantiated claims about how this could be compromised. Even if there is a bug that allows such apps to collect location info, that has nothing to do with Snowden leaks.

If a government is keen on collecting such information, they would simply not use Google/Apple's APIs and instead roll their own using bluetooth and location services. This was pointed out in the article. Now could you explain to us why you're promoting a conspiracy theory that the government will lean on Apple and Google to introduce malicious bugs into their APIs when they don't need the APIs at all?

> There is nothing in the book that indicates that Google's implementation of the contact tracing spec would deviate from the spec either through incompetence or malice.

I agree I'd trust Google over the government and many others. But the OP you are replying to called for releasing the source code, and reproducible builds. If you do that, you don't have to trust somebodies word or the laws of the land, you have the laws of mathematics in your court.

Surely you are not saying what is a clearly inferior solution is one we should be using.

I'm not arguing for the existence of any specific deliberate conspiracy. So please don't misrepresent what I'm saying as conspiracy theory.

Still, there are multiple plausible ways in which these apps and systems can be compromised by malicious actors (from any nationality). The risks are significantly larger than they need to, to a large degree due to lack of transparency and verifiability, and significant trust elements.

These risks are not inherent in the design of the contact-tracing system or the specific companies themselves, but they are inherent in the way smartphone apps are typically developed and distributed to end-users on mainstream platforms today.

Then on top of that, past and ongoing incidents obliterates my personal confidence that large U.S. tech companies will live up to their promises.

Institutional trust has been eroding since Watergate and almost non-existent since Snowden leaks.

Seeing Apples name on the PRISM slide was a gut bunch, you dont and will never get blind trust anymore.

Saying this is similar to the anti-vax movement is so frustrating for me to read when special closed courts are set up in my country to deliver verdicts on the legality of data acquisition and they STILL found the GCHQ overeached and illegally spied on citizens.

The UK gov has even decided to not use the API provided by Apple here so if I could trust Apple (which I don't) its being undermined by the fact the government decided to take Palantir on to help make it and it looks like they are getting involved in the US effort too.

Yeah but it is still Palantir, so maybe don't trust the government's judgement that much.

If you want to restore trust then stop fighting with users and give them control over their devices.

iOS is full of dark patterns and a few absolutely awful restrictions that are very anti user. It shouldn’t be surprising that the users don’t trust Apple.

(Hopefully this doesn’t come across as disrespectful, I think the work you guys have done on contact tracing is awesome.)

In your example, institutions built up trust and it was broken by some third party. Public health was compromised as a result.

In the case of privacy, the trust was broken by the institutions themselves (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, US gov obviously as well). Public privacy was eroded as a result.

Yeah it's really self righteous of an Apple employee compare their employer to the entire international multi decade effort to develop and distribute life saving and civilization changing vaccines.

Apple is not an "institution". A arm of government or a long standing NGO are institutions. Apple is a business, it shouldn't get institutional trust.

> A arm of government or a long standing NGO are institutions

The New York Times is neither of those, yet many people would characterize it, alongside the Fourth Estate, as institutions. The term "institution" codes depth beyond legal form [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution

Pertaining to 'institutional trust'. One ought to be able to trust e.g. government. Alas you can not (I am a public servant).

One should never unequivocally trust for-profit companies.

Also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszcms

Making such big difference between government and (big) companies seems naive. One should never trust neither government nor companies. They are not that different, both are power structures with vastly more power and different concerns and priorities than an individual.

There are many parallels between them. Companies run on economic power, government run on political (and also economic and hard) power. Companies are kept at bay by market forces, government by democratic process. Both of them may work or fail (monopolies in market, different kinds of identity politics in democratic process). Both companies and government can do extraordinary good (when incentives are well aligned and leaders are competent) and extraordinary bad (when either is not true). Both can empower petty tyrants inside their hierarchies. The reasonable way is to keep both dependent on each other and to limit each to their own domain.

Apple doesn't make it easy to be liked overall. For example, trying to get 30% of a company revenue to publish an app on ios store and push the arrogance all the way to ask a company to change its business model is insane. I'm not gonna go all the way to ask to be able to build or test things in containers, but at least do it easily in virtual machines legally without having to buy or rent some apple hardware for no good reason. Why not even being able to build ios apps outside of macos? There's no technical reason not to be able to do so neither.

For me, the discrepancy between apple marketing around the products and how it feels being stuck in the past as soon as having to build and support anything related to apple makes the whole company not likeable and not trustworthy.

We are culturally obsessed with "Luke, trust your feelings." There is something extremely wrong and dangerous with Star Wars and that idea to put away reason and just trust our feelings. Joseph Campbell what did you do?

Maybe not everything can be explained with reason, the unconscious mind can play its part.

Give me an example from history where everyday 'papers please' has worked out well.

There are many reasons to challenge broad authoritarian policy. Don't pollute the dialog with anti-vaxers, that shuts down a completely legitimate conversation that should happen in a healthy society.

Accepting wide-spread social tracking unchallenged is worrisome. I should not have to explain to intelligent minds why. The paths you open up when you allow something like social compliance tracking and scoring are just terrifying. Way more terrifying for our children than the immediate health problems.

> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge.

You frame that like society itself or the people that make up society are somehow at fault. Perhaps the issue is that elements of society like Apple have taken actions or have failed to take actions which would have engendered the sort of reaction that you would prefer to see.

If Apple wants my trust they need to earn it.

Why should I give Apple my trust again after being burned by them repeatedly?

Does Apple even trust me?

> feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust

The main mistake is that you compare, emotionally at least, Apple to an institute. But it's not, it's a commercial company. "We" never had or should have had any trust in commercial companies - maybe besides small ones as someone else noted here.

The problem is that as a society we allowed a few commercial companies to become such an inherent part of our lives.

The size of the company doesn’t matter. Small companies are not inherently less evil. You can have a company with no VC backing or shareholders and screw over your customers at every turn. The idea that the size of the organization is directly related to whether or not it is worth trusting is ridiculous. Just because I don’t know everyone at a hospital doesn’t mean they aren’t worth trusting.

I was referring to this comment, I agree with what's written there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077187

I think I trust Apple more than any other FAANG company, but that's like saying you're the cleanest hog in the pen. Even if it's true, it doesn't necessarily mean much and you're still tarred by association. The tech industry has burned through trust at a blistering pace in the last decade and it's hard not to be cynical.

> ...but I feel like as a society we’ve swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge.

I understand and completely empathize with your concern. I do think this lack of trust is and is going to cause very serious problems. However, this mistrust has been earned.

The incentives of large companies seem to be odds with what many people consider good for themselves or their communities.

We like to tell ourselves that a company’s goals must align with a community’s concerns or another company will come along and replace them. But this doesn’t seem to happen in reality and if it does, it can take decades which by that time, the damage is already done. Particularly if the company is above a certain size or retain a certain percent of their market. At scale companies can and regularly do act almost antagonistic towards their customers and the communities in which they live.

During some college research I found an older article from years ago and while I’ve looked repeatedly, I haven’t been able to find it again (If anyone knows it, please please let me know.) I’m running off of memory here so forgive me for the weak description. The author had researched and discovered how most very large companies used to require that every move they made would place a very high value on how it would impact their local community first and then place a high value on how the decision would impact their wider customer’s communities. These considerations played a massive role in whether or not they would move forward with the idea. If I’m remembering correctly this was written into these massive companies bylaws. Their first concern wasn’t regarding profit, it was about community impacts, and then profit came later in the decision.

I think we’ve gotten too far away from this and it’s going to cause even more damage than we’ve already seen. We’re so far away from this ideal and now an awful lot of companies will first decide if they can get away with something and if it will cause quarterly growth, then it’s worth moving forward on with little thought into wider impacts. This change has led to little if any thought going into the community wide second and third order effects. The fallout means we’re now dealing with a drastic diminishing trust in companies.

I share your concerns because I don’t think large organizations are inherently untrustworthy, and I know many (if not most) people inside these organizations have higher ideals and many companies have the best of intentions, but I think their hands are tied by systemic problems and these problems are eroding at fundamental societal trust systems.

Companies shouldn't be allow to become as rich and powerful as Apple. We're supposed to live in a democratic system. Corporate power on the scale of FAANG is the antithesis of democracy.

The problem with Apple is not that it is big, but that it uses its power in one market segment (phones) to control other market segments (phone apps). And not just to gain dominance, but to have total market control through App Store.

If anti-monopoly offices were able to force Microsoft to offer competing browsers after OS installation, then they should force Apple and Google to offer competing App Stores, each with its own app policies.

Thought experiment: People willingly giving this power over to an alternative group of people (a company in this case) could be considered a democratic vote from a populace? Providing power is willingly given to them by the actions of the group.

At best people are voting for who has the best product or service to solve their immediate needs. I don't buy Apple products (and I'm fully in the Apple ecosystem) because of Apple's great vision for how society should develop. Democracy operates on a different plane.

So a democratic system that ignores property rights when it suits the mob that is not actually Democratic.

property rights of companies or individuals?

democracy is about individual freedoms and rights, not necessarily those of profit-seeking entities

And are not individual workers "profit-seeking entities"

btw I do own Apple shares so what about my rights not to have those expropriated.

Corporations are just legal conctructs to easily define rights and powers of their owners. So property rights of companies are just property rights of their owners.

I do think that open sourcing and transparency matter a lot in this era. Do that first before claiming the hard work, if not what's the difference between a mad scientist and a doctor?

I don't doubt that the people doing this are competent, doing their best and are aiming for a privacy preserving solution.

But that is irrelevant.

1. Neither Google nor Apple deserve the trust this requires. Seriously!

2. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are arguably pushing tons of resources which will directly harm all current and future human societies. It is not what this precedent will do for us during this epidemic, but afterwards. Also, normalizing tracking is not self fulfilling for Google and Apple, not at all...

Thanks for all you hard work?

> but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge

Why do you assume we ever had that trust? Corporations and Government have never had personal data on such a scale before and we've never had such little control over this data. Especially with google, your expecting us to trust a spyware company.

> The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process

Anti-vaxers have been around as long as vaccinations have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#History

I'd say this trust has never existed, there was just an illusion that it was because we couldn't see into others bubbles so easily.

> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge.

Good. That took almost 10 millenia of human development to achieve. Let's not regress.

Unfortunately, these companies earned our distrust and cynicism. I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I can't bring myself to believe that Google and - to a lesser extent - Apple are not going to record this data. I also don't believe that American companies have the liberty to disobey the US government and their letter agencies if they request this data to be recorded for them to abuse later. And for that reason, I will be disabling any tracking on my phone.

>just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there,

The anti-vaxxers may be wrong, but boiling it down to a "celebrity's feels" seriously underestimates the movement, and likely adds to the reasons these people don't trust the institutions.

Equating anti vaxxers with corporate skeptics is a surefire way to build trust /s

Distrust and caution are the parents of security.

- Benjamin Franklin

Institutions earned their current distrust.

> I can understand why the public is skeptical

You can understand the skepticism and yet equate the skeptical people to "anti-vax" movement? That's very sneaky of you.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair.

Both movements disregard evidence and reality to fit their feelings.

Please show the scientific consensus that corporations are good, have almost no side effects and we should trust them.

Please show me where I made such a blanket, absolute statement.

What evidence is being disregarded here?

I can’t wrap my head around this kind of hate towards the Apple/Google contact tracing. If Apple or Google wanted to track your location they would just do it using the GPS on your phone. Short of getting rid of your phone there would be nothing you could do to stop it. If they wanted to allow specific apps to track your location they would just give those apps access to your location in the background.

It seems like the governments, that you seem to trust, would much rather take that much simpler approach. Instead we have these two companies building a system that is more restrictive than location services in every way.

If you own a phone you are already trusting Apple, Google, or both. Let’s not pretend otherwise. The contact tracing system just means you don’t also need to trust the government or what ever entity is building contact tracing apps.

It completely outrageous for you to characterize my critical views as "hate" for anything.

It doesn't "seem". It is clearly my preference to have any sort of surveillance be done by a government that answers to ME, the citizen. EULA vs Constitution.

And no, I do not trust them with anything.

And also an interesting little fact about "governments". They change. People have been known to have substantial say in their behavior. And there is that little ("hateful") matter of Law of the land.

Disgusting comment. A person is genuinely invested and passionate about privacy (and we know Apple’s stance on privacy, from Steve Jobs, to their stance with FBI, privacy tsars, keeping data on the phone, Secure Enclave, etc) and you call their work garbage.

> A person is genuinely invested and passionate about privacy...and you call their work garbage.

I'm referring to the output of Google and Apple as garbage. You're the one trying to make this personal. I don't really care that an individual cares about privacy. It has nothing to do with the machine they are a part of.

> and we know Apple’s stance on privacy

No we don't. We don't "know" anything. Are you serious?

To be able to install anything that uses the new contact tracing stuff, you must own a phone that is based either on iOS or Android. I'm honestly curious: if you are using any of those already, is that not even worse than this "garbage" you talk about?

I actually posted my comment from my Android phone. And yes, it is garbage.

Amazing. A pretentious, emotionally-manipulative version of "if you don't trust closed-sourced public corporate #43214 you're basically an anti-vaxxer!" is the most upvoted comment in this HN thread. Hilarious

Comparing privacy advocates to anti-vaxxers is a bad-faith tactic that steers the conversation away from the technology.

How's anti-vaccination in any way comparable to lack of trust in corporations? We have decades of evidence showing the efficacy of vaccines. Ask any old pediatrician what hospitals were like before vaccines. Can Apple and Google produce equally strong evidence that their new surveillance system will reduce mortality and be resistant to abuse?

More to the point, we have decades of evidence showing the efficacy of vaccines, and we have decades of evidence showing that corporations cannot be trusted with anything and that it's always a matter of when, not if, they back on any promise they've made.

is the private data PRISM safe?

All your data stays on your device. You only upload your random identifier if you test positive, as confirmed by a trusted health provider. I would worry much more about them if I were you. Personally I'm far more concerned about dying from COVID-19 than the government who already knows much about me abuses my health status of this virus.

No data is. You can't judge the security or privacy of a design based on people selling it out in secret.

I know people at Facebook who say the same thing, but at the end of the day, both companies only pay lip service to privacy in the way their products and services actually operate.

If we paint privacy as simply black or white, sure. But if there exist shades of grey in privacy than Apple and Facebook are on vastly different sides of the spectrum.

One hands all your data over to the Chinese government if you are Chinese. The other gives your data to Cambridge Analytica. I wouldn't say they're vastly different.

Why are you so sure the data remains private? Has Apple never handed data over to the gov. for investigations criminal and otherwise? Some of the genetic companies hand data to the FBI. The reason is great and moral, tracking down serial killers and the like. But, still, regardless of how good the proximate reason, the overarching trend is not so great.

And yes, I'm sure all the telecoms, hospitals, etc. also hand over our data. Adding one more, much more comprehensive data source to the pile doesn't help anything.

Because this data doesn't exist on Apple servers, and what does exist are a bunch of randomly generated identifiers. Have you read the proposal at all [1]?

[1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing

It's not clear from these specifications on how the rolling IDs are associated with a single user after a diagnosis is made, and whether those keys are interlinked. While this explains the phone-to-phone model it does not explain the other half of the system from what I can tell.

I think by design they're not meant to be associated with a single user. A hospital would publish all id's of users that have found positive with covid and each other individual user's themselves will see if they have been in contact recently with one since they have saved all id's they've seen recently

Could network analysis be used to deanonymize these rolling ids? I remember reading that network analysis easily deanonymizes blockchains. Seems same would apply to rolling ids.

Apple complies with warrants, yes. Do you think they should not?

This just sounds like ad-hominem to me. How is this relevant to the truth of the statements in the parent comment?

Sounds like they answered my question.

Show me any institution that has maintained trustworthiness for all of history, and I'll consider trusting Apple/Google/our govt. with the ability to tell where every citizen is and who they associate with for the rest of the future.

I'm just not sure why we're more trusting of our wireless service providers who have explicitly given personal location data away to not only the government, but also to advertisers, than we are of Apple who would love to sell us another $1200 phone.

Convenience.

Convenience always wins.

Read the fine specification.

orrrrr don't install it at all, or delete the app when Covid-19 is no longer a threat like I plan to do.

I find it disingenuous that u use antivax in your argument. First of all the tech industry has been thriving on selling out and exploiting personal data for decades, and this 'business model' has become in practice unavoidable on the online world. And while big pharma has many deep flaws, making people deliberately ill through vaxination programs isn't it.

Secondly, everyone that understands low powered radio wave signals and keeps abrest of covid-19 infection vectors can plainly see that any correlation between those two are going to be extremely weak at best, and extremely easy to game.

No vaxine with such poor results would be allowed on the market, let alone prescribed.

This is a bad case of tech utopist solutioning gone awry.