Topic: Privacy and Covid-19 (Read 181 times)

It's useful to separate two discrete issues.

A) What math and encryption will and will not do.

B) What power structures (include here not just government, but all those commercial interests that want your cloud data) was.

My point is that it is 100% possible and practical for the tracking necessary to trace person to person transmission of Covid-19 at level A, without (B).

It's important for the Crypto community to stand up and say things like this, because otherwise the exact trap you cite will be fronted and no one will say it's not necessary to give up privacy.

This can't be done without the government requesting a backdoor to access data for all of this information. The government is probably going to try to pitch an idea like this, they're most likely going to say that its done to ensure that during an emergency people are safe. Once this ends though, the government isn't going to give up stuff like this -- they're going to keep the program running and just continue to track people.

That's why we have the privacy issues we have today, all the monitoring, surveillance, etc didn't just come out of nowhere. An emergency happens where people just want action to come, then action comes through legislation, government grows and they don't give back that control after the crisis.

I could see your way of being viable but the problem with introducing relative pseudo data points is that it opens up your device for the purpose of tracking and people don't trust the government for keeping their promise of not overstepping their bounds.

Obviously, I'm sure software engineers could create a way that doesn't give root access to governments but nonetheless you're still going to have data mining so it's already in conflict with the 5th amendment.

I'm not in favor of tracking, but have illustrated a way it could be done with user selected levels of anonymity.

Explore the concept a bit. The government (USA in this case, other countries people don't have our bill of rights) does not have a right the tracking data. But YOU have a right to know if YOU were in close contact, and that certainly could be told to you, but not who, without his approval to release of his name.

Privacy is not synonymous with lack of tracking, and tracking is not synonymous with intrusive government, or with government at all.

From my understanding, the government tracking idea where you could use cellular devices to contact trace cases of coronavirus was shot down almost immediately on the federal level for having constitutional worries. It won't happen.

It is a fact that tracking of all individuals would lead to ability to back track spreading of Covid 19. For government to have such an ability is obviously a serious problem as far as any safeguard of privacy. And it's reasonable to expect that if government agencies are given such a power, they would abuse it and not be willing to cease using and abusing that data.

It's also clear that commercial interests often package an algorithm and software as an "app" with your "data in the cloud," and that they do this so they can steal and abuse your data, not because it is necessary.

However, these are not necessary results of a perceived need to track people for reasons of preventing Covid 19 spread. I will show how.

Suppose that all data of position from an individual's phone was publicly recorded, but his identity is hidden and his location is hidden. Then, he cannot be identified. How could this be done?

If location data is x and y offset from a position we'll call pseudo(0,0) then it isn't known even what part of the world that data is related to. Each person's data can be offset from a discrete pseudo(0,0), and in most cases these should be different.

An individual might permit various levels of access to his track, and might request access to track data of those who paralleled his positions.

A government entity might request nexus data, backwards from those who tested positive and who permitted the nexus data.

Arguments to the contrary, that this cannot be done or isn't practical, are really misdirection of the entire issue to permit the government and commercial interests to collect and outright or under the table abuse user data. Period.