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Mon 13 Apr, 2020 06:52 am
Anyone who has a cellphone with Android or Apple is being tracked (unless you have specifically turned it off). Google has data on every place you have visited, and they know your location at any time to within 6 feet. If you go to "Google timeline" they will draw a map of every place, every business, every house and every street corner you visited for any day in the past couple of years.
Up until now, this data has been very closely protected. Google uses it to figure out where there is traffic congestion... but only in an anonymous way
If we don't care about privacy, this data is incredibly useful for fighting coronavirus. If Alice Parker is tested positive for the virus, Google can then generate a list of everyone Alice had dinner with or visited, who bagged her groceries or who walked past her on the street. These people can then be contacted and tracked. You can even see exactly where the virus is spreading person by person.
This relies on Google's ability to report that "Alice Parker visited Derek Baker on April 2nd and stayed for 2 hour and 45 minutes and left hurriedly at 1:32am " to the government or some central authority.
If we are going to do this, they need to know with whom you are sleeping and from whom you buy unsanctioned herbal medicine.
Are you willing to give up privacy for the sake of a power weapon against the virus?
They likely already do track us via the phones.
@Sturgis,
Google definitely does. They send me a "monthly timeline" giving me detailed accounts of everyone I have gone on any specific day. On a couple of occasions this is useful... when my daughter and I wanted to return to a bakery we stumbled upon during a bike ride in Salem, we were able to retrace our path for that day in the form of a blue line on Google maps.
Google claims to not share this data with anyone (and so far I trust them).
The question is whether sharing this personal data
for the purpose of contact tracing in order to fight the virus is legitimate. For this to work, you would need to minimize the number of people who can choose to opt out.
@maxdancona,
Google claims not to share. From some of the SPAM FOLDER contents, I am forced to wonder.
@Sturgis,
My question is whether you think fighting this epidemic is a legitimate use of your personal data?
@maxdancona,
Given the numbers of nitwits who are not capable of adhering to social distancing themselves, I believe it's a good thing. Something which can be applied at various times, such as if this sort of horror happens again (which I suspect it will).
@Sturgis,
Sturgis wrote:
Given the numbers of nitwits who are not capable of adhering to social distancing themselves, I believe it's a good thing. Something which can be applied at various times, such as if this sort of horror happens again (which I suspect it will).
The idea of tracking you isn't to force "nitwits" to "adhere to social distancing".
They would track your movement so that when Eleanor Jones from down the street tests positive, they can find out that you and she were at the same convenience store at the same time. That way they can send government workers to your house to administer a test and keep you under forced quarantine (if either the test is positive or if you refuse to take it).
Once they start doing that, then they can relax social distancing requirements.
@maxdancona,
Well then I'm safe seeing as how Eleanor Jones doesn't live on my block.
And there should be no relaxation of social distancing before this thing is eradicated.
@Sturgis,
Are you really not seeing the issue here? The question is whether to let the government (or a government related authority) use cellphone data to do contact tracing. I don't know about you, but that
crosses a line that I usually see as important to civil liberties.
Contract tracing for covid-19 lets the government track everyone that you have been in contact with. They want to know that you were visiting or talking to someone infected with the virus.
Contract tracing can also be used to see if you are visiting or talking with
known Muslims, or socialists or subversives. The technology would be the same. We are opening a door that I find troubling in terms of civil liberties.
I used a simple prepay phone without GPS at times such phones are call burner phones.
As I do not change my phones out an even allow my name to be associated with the phone so the phone I carry can not be consider a true burner phone but it is harder to track then most phones an without GPS you can not pin point if location with any great accurately.
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