> Given all those unknowns, I shouldn’t express an opinion on ‘do we need this’ and so I won’t.
A blog post is a form of expression / opinion, isn't it?
The technique is limited in time, after the pandemic I'm hoping usage will drop to zero. Coming from the two major OS vendors, we now have a point where we can get it to be shut off after the threat is contained. The proposal by Google / Apple does not touch upon the serverside other than recommending restrictions on usage of the data that is gathered and shared.
> Find out if someone specific is sick
Many countries already have mandatory reporting paths for infectious diseases, if you operate an office building it is likely that you will find out if somebody using that building has to quarantine themselves for a few weeks already.
You will want to know if someone specific that you have been in contact with is sick. This reads like you are pointing out the main reason for why we do contact tracing in the first place as a negative leakage path.
> I won’t know who they are, but I can at least grab aggregate information about where coronavirus getters travel.
You do not know who they are, you can track an infected persons movement (assuming 100% coverage) at most over a single day. Existing tracking using Bluetooth and other signals a typical smartphone puts out already allows you to do more. The problem in this scenario is a lack of customer protection rights, not one of the proposal being bad.
> Increased hit rate of stationary / marketing beacons
Again, that's a policy issue more than a technical one and pretty US centric. As you correctly point out it also isn't new. The data they gather now will likely be less useful than what they can get with the broken MAC randomization stuff phones put out before.
> Leakage of information when someone isn’t sick
The alternative to the first bullet point is running around infected. The second point seems unrelated to the method of contact tracing. With existing manual contact tracing, the health authority could also tell you that you're infected and get your DNA.
> Fraud resistance
Most civilized countries have central reporting for positive test results, making the fraud resistance argument moot. This supplements existing, manual, contact tracing. The proposal itself has nothing to do with that part of the workflow, it merely helps app developers to take care of a crucial and previously hard part of the stack and suggests a well designed crypto scheme to ensure privacy in the scope of the exchanged data itself.
The only realistic scenario in here seems like that of existing stationary marketing beacons, which I'd propose to look at in terms of realism and the tradeoff between the status quo of manual contact tracing (which is inefficient, labor intensive, and error prone). In the realism aspect, marketing firms are hardly on the edge of technology. How likely is it for a major player to upgrade their systems with this tracking capability in the timeframe of the pandemic? What insight do they gather on those infected? If you're infected you would have to realistically share a few days worth of keys.
> The technique is limited in time, after the pandemic I'm hoping usage will drop to zero.
Do you think it's likely that, if successful, this same technique would be proposed to reduce the negative economic impact from the traditional seasonal flu in future?
I'm not a doctor but it is my understanding that the traditional flu is an impractical target for this type of contact tracing due to various reasons and would not make much sense. At any rate, this is a huge measure even if the privacy impact is limited. As a German I don't particularly like tracking of any kind and am relatively certain that extending the measure beyond the scenario of a pandemic wouldn't go over well with the population where I live.
Yeah but that's one of these constructed arguments. "People" outside of our community already had BT enabled all the time. That's not a new "leakage path" introduced by a protocol designed with privacy in mind.
I can only speak for the situation in Germany, here manual contact tracing and tracking of infectious diseases is done through a chain of local and federal health authorities and data is processed by them together with some, publicly funded I believe, institutes. I would assume the CDC to have a similar role in the US.
A blog post is a form of expression / opinion, isn't it?
The technique is limited in time, after the pandemic I'm hoping usage will drop to zero. Coming from the two major OS vendors, we now have a point where we can get it to be shut off after the threat is contained. The proposal by Google / Apple does not touch upon the serverside other than recommending restrictions on usage of the data that is gathered and shared.
> Find out if someone specific is sick
Many countries already have mandatory reporting paths for infectious diseases, if you operate an office building it is likely that you will find out if somebody using that building has to quarantine themselves for a few weeks already.
You will want to know if someone specific that you have been in contact with is sick. This reads like you are pointing out the main reason for why we do contact tracing in the first place as a negative leakage path.
> I won’t know who they are, but I can at least grab aggregate information about where coronavirus getters travel.
You do not know who they are, you can track an infected persons movement (assuming 100% coverage) at most over a single day. Existing tracking using Bluetooth and other signals a typical smartphone puts out already allows you to do more. The problem in this scenario is a lack of customer protection rights, not one of the proposal being bad.
> Increased hit rate of stationary / marketing beacons
Again, that's a policy issue more than a technical one and pretty US centric. As you correctly point out it also isn't new. The data they gather now will likely be less useful than what they can get with the broken MAC randomization stuff phones put out before.
> Leakage of information when someone isn’t sick
The alternative to the first bullet point is running around infected. The second point seems unrelated to the method of contact tracing. With existing manual contact tracing, the health authority could also tell you that you're infected and get your DNA.
> Fraud resistance
Most civilized countries have central reporting for positive test results, making the fraud resistance argument moot. This supplements existing, manual, contact tracing. The proposal itself has nothing to do with that part of the workflow, it merely helps app developers to take care of a crucial and previously hard part of the stack and suggests a well designed crypto scheme to ensure privacy in the scope of the exchanged data itself.
The only realistic scenario in here seems like that of existing stationary marketing beacons, which I'd propose to look at in terms of realism and the tradeoff between the status quo of manual contact tracing (which is inefficient, labor intensive, and error prone). In the realism aspect, marketing firms are hardly on the edge of technology. How likely is it for a major player to upgrade their systems with this tracking capability in the timeframe of the pandemic? What insight do they gather on those infected? If you're infected you would have to realistically share a few days worth of keys.