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Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by gruez on Saturday July 25, 2020 @10:42AM (#23949542)
It is, though. If you're not infected you retain your privacy, but once you're infected and give up your contact tracing key, everyone can know whether you have been near them or not. Combine this fact with a network of Bluetooth beacons at fixed locations and a malicious actor can basically track where anywhere an infected person has went.
Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by usrusr on Saturday July 25, 2020 @11:13AM (#23949770)
"everyone can know whether you have been near them or not."

For a very broad definition of "you" and for an unconventionally small set called "everyone". If you are forced to quarantine, a lot of people will know about your infection anyways, completely without any convoluted mental gymnastics about theoretical deanonyzation possibilities. Epidemic control has always been a very low privacy endeavor and app-based tracing following the Google/Apple model doesn't change that the tiniest bit. In fact of it was fully deployed it could replace a lot of far more invasive tracing, causing a net increase in privacy.

Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by Lammy on Saturday July 25, 2020 @11:19AM (#23949821)
I wish I could believe some new form of surveillance would ever "replace a lot of far more invasive tracing" and not just increase the overall scope of collection. This type of BT-based "offline/historic" mass-snitching just gives privacy-conscious people another thing to have to hide from in addition to the cellular network itself.
Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by jmkerr on Saturday July 25, 2020 @11:17AM (#23949800)
Random Bluetooth identifiers rotate every 10-20 minutes, to help prevent tracking [1]. (Of course it's always possible to track phones with their radios on for some time and distance.)

[1] https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...

Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by gruez on Saturday July 25, 2020 @12:01PM (#23950169)
That's irrelevant because once you're infected, you give up your daily keys[1], which allow your random ids to be correlated together.

[1] technically this is optional, but not doing so also means you're not reporting your infected status to others, which kills the point of contact tracing.

Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by tzs on Saturday July 25, 2020 @01:22PM (#23950853)
The medical facility that diagnoses you does not get your keys, if I'm understanding the system correctly. They give you a key that you give to your phone, and your phone then uploads the daily keys. Unless your phone includes identifying information with that upload, the daily keys are still anonymous at that point.

The hypothetical malicious actor would need to have (1) listened at some location where you were and captured the key you were broadcasting at the time, (2) identified you by some other means, such as face recognition, while you were at that location, and (3) infiltrated the server where your phone uploaded its daily keys so they could find out what other keys came from the same device as the one they captured and correlated with you already.

If they do all that then they could tell which other locations they were capturing key broadcasts at that you visited.

If they have not gained access to the data at the upload server, then all they get from matching your key to your real identity at one location is what other key listening location you visited before the key rotated.

They could put the face recognition systems (or whatever they are using) at their other key listening stations...but then they don't need the keys.

This seems like a lot of effort for little gain on the part of the malicious actor.

Re:Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere by jmkerr on Saturday July 25, 2020 @03:49PM (#23951864)
You're right, I wonder why they didn't harden it just a little by transmitting less and listening more, or by changing keys more often.