Eireann, this a fantastic intuition. I have taken the liberty of adding it to the writeup. Thank you so much!
Would love to. Ping @markomanka!
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https://www.crick.ac.uk/research/covid-19/covid19-consortium ← Open Data on COVID-19 testing.
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Sarcasm follows:
Collecting data from citizens.
It is also great for tracking homosexuals. After all, homosexuality is considered a disease in many places.
Also, tracking abortions could be possible.
Tracking criminals, like environmental activists and writers of political texts.
All for the good cause.
Below, a link to how willingly some walk this path.
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Right. Huge danger. If they do that in the USA, Trump and his gang would use data like that as a political weapon.
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Meanwhile, the push for trackers is going full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. Except there is a lot of disagreement on how to go about it. Centralized or decentralized data? And assuming that whatever approach gets taken, there will be some collateral damage. Support individual privacy over better tracking? Or the other way around? See:
And in South Korea, where containment has been relatively successful, they take a far more transparent approach, also full of deep tradeoffs:
From there:
Mere weeks after the initial flurry of articles pondering whether or not democracies were better equipped to deal with pandemics, few countries were getting away with not sacrificing some kinds of freedom. As Kim pointed out, the true question was which freedoms to prioritize. The chaos of the MERS outbreak had left the public with a grim conviction: sacrificing some individual privacy was simply the upfront cost of avoiding more debilitating consequences down the line.
South Koreans have decided that, during an infectious-disease outbreak, there is a strong, pragmatic case to be made in favor of what might be called virtuous surveillance—a radically transparent version of people-tracking that is subject to public scrutiny and paired with stringent legal safeguards against abuse. Despite its imperfections, South Korea’s policy is striking for the fact that it brings the mechanisms and outcomes of surveillance into the public forum. In doing so, it appeals to a deeper sense of civic trust—the belief that, in a crisis, the citizenry can be relied upon to play its part.
This of course is based on a high level of surveillance, “This is one of the benefits of having a universal health-care system,’ Eom told me, gesturing behind us. 'When they enter your personal identification number, they can review your travel history.”
afaik South Korea already is a total surveillance state…
So the classic tradeoff between privacy and security. Except so often, you lose the privacy for sure. But does that translate into better security?
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- There are currently 43 contact tracing apps available globally
- India’s Aarogya Setu is the most popular, with 50 million downloads
- 28% of apps have no privacy policy
- 64% of apps use GPS rather than Bluetooth
Note:
- 50 million downloads is still about 6% of the population of India, very far from the effectiveness threshold.
- GPS is much less precise than Bluetooth.
hat tip: @napo
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The situation is highly fluid. Over last weekend, the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) has collapsed over privacy concerns. Score one for the “non-solutionist” approach advocated in our call vs. the magic app.
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It looks like the scientific and tech communities are increasingly disassociating themselves from the contact tracing app trope. I have news of open letters from these communities expressing concern in:
- Italy, led by Turin Polytechnic. This is one is urgent enough that I received a personal invitation to sign it, from Francesca Bria, currently the chairwoman of Italy’s largest public VC fund.
- Belgium, led by KU Leuven.
- The Netherlands
@teirdes has filed a “JO anmälan” (legal term) against Göteborg city (one of the largest cities in Sweden) on the topic of collecting information in a public cloud provider, Microsoft Office 365. Touches on many of the topics we have discussed in many threads here.
I listened to the whole interview and strongly recommended it. It’s in Swedish.
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I get so tired whenever I hear about this kind of thing. For a country that is supposed to be at the forefront of digitalisation this stuff happens remarkably often. Why exactly are our public institutions on effin microsoft???
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Good question.
The real answer is probably that our political leaders do not care about their communities members enough to take these issues seriously.
Force of habit and resistance to change, as well as ridiculously high institutional fears of being blamed when something goes wrong. Additionally, even if there are knowledgeable staff they frequently don’t get backing from their bosses and there is a tendency to reward behaviour that approaches “I went to a conference and saw a powerpoint about a software tool from a vendor and now I really want to buy it”.
I was personally slightly disillusioned when I saw an elected official from the region where I was living in at the time share in some social medium that I forget which one it was their “progressive IT intervenion on health IT systems” that looked something like: slide 1: lots of arrows going back and forth, and slide 2: only three arrows going back and forth, with the “ingenious” political point “having fewer arrows going back and forth is great! let’s pay a lot of money for that!!!”
Sorry if the presentation of this grievance isn’t best precise. Sigh.
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Well, it looks like Apple/Google has forced something of a standard for contact tracing apps over the wishes of Germany (and likely many other nations).
I go into detail here: The State of COVID-19 Exposure Notifications.
I’m curious about other people’s thoughts on this development. It looks like a ‘middle way’ that is better than much of what was on the table. The two red flags for me:
- The solution is corporate controlled and the actual implementation is closed-source.
- Many epidemiologists are skeptical of automated contract tracing’s effectiveness.
There are also ways to abuse this solution, which concern me. From a cryptographic perspective, the engineering does seem quite sound.
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Hello @schmudde, welcome! That’s a hell of a post, thanks for writing it.
I am impressed that you consider the Apple-Google exposure notification tech CCC-compliant. That is more than I hoped for. Also, I like your list of dangers, and the point about these apps being somewhere between “potentially helpful, given cheap and rapid testing” to “totally useless” was brought up by several people, also during the Surveillance Pandemic call. In general, the Magic Covid App reminds me of “if we had a loaf of bread, we could make a chicken sandwich, if we had some chicken”; where the app is the bread, and testing capacity is the chicken. Your final list of privacy-infringing government actions is also chilling.
I also have a question for you. If the Apple-Google code is not open source, on what basis is the infosec community evaluating its cryptographic soundness?
Glad to be here. I’m looking forward to continued conversations.
I used some pretty imprecise language when talking about CCC compliance. Your post made me revisit that footnote and include the Nexa Institute’s Open Letter.
My original tone was favorable because I was a little surprised how many of the boxes Apple/Google managed to check. I didn’t expect them to open source the effort. But I also didn’t expect them to come up with a decentralized solution. It makes sense in hindsight. Apple has demonstrated that they really do not want to be caught holding the keys and answering a government subpoena.
Obviously infosec cannot vouch for the soundness of this implementation. It only “seems like” sound cryptography (using my words in the article). The problems will arise post-facto. An analyst like Ben Thompson would argue that Apple absolutely must deliver the promises they make in their white paper. For example, they have taken the reputation of iMessage very seriously - it may be their most valuable software asset outside of OSX/iOS. Failing to do so could affect their bottom line and shareholder value.
The only other thing we have to go on is their inspiration, the open source D3-PT.
So yeah, the fact it’s not open source is a real shame. I think you and I would both agree that Apple/Google could benefit tremendously by making it open source. I’m not sure why it is closed. Any ideas? They both run plenty of open source projects.
And indeed, testing is the chicken.
This makes plenty of sense. But still, there is the NSA backdoor problem… or has that gone away since the PRISM days? I admit I lost track of that debate.
Haha, I signed that one myself. Good people, and I respect the MEP that got in touch with me to propose that (Irene Tinagli).
NSA requests for backdoors are a little less fashionable after the CIA spied on the Senate in 2014. But this pendulum has swung back and forth with congress and the intelligence committee since the 1970s. I’m sure it will continue.
I was referencing the Apple/FBI fight after the 2015 San Bernardino shooting. If you remember, the FBI used the courts to try to make Apple hand over information - essentially forcing open a back door. Apple changed iMessage encryption after this incident, which offers two advantages.
- They can’t hand over keys if they don’t have them.
- They can’t build a backdoor if they don’t even have a front door.
I don’t have any predictions about how this will play out in the future, but this is the precedent from the last five years. So it makes sense that Apple would adopt a technology where they have no access to user data. It’s the safest for them.
I can certainly see a day where lawmakers try and force Apple to build a less secure iMessage. We will see.
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