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 Everything you describe is outdated since his whistleblowing in 2013.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.