Podcast 232: Can We Decentralize Contact Tracing?
This week, we chat with Sham Kakade, a professor of computer science, statistics, and data science at the University of Washington. A group from his university, along with volunteers from Microsoft, is creating a contact tracing app called Covid Safe. Sham explains how technology could make it possible for democratic nations to fight the pandemic while preserving civil liberties.
You can read more about Sham’s app, Covid Safe, here.
The app isn’t live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Android demo here and help the team work out the bugs. You can also use that link to find their GitHub community.
You can read Paul’s take on the contact tracing spec released by Apple and Google here.
This is a two part episode, so tune in Friday for the second half.
Tags: bulletin, contact tracing, covid safe, covid-19, decentralized, pandemic, privacy, stack overflow, stackoverflow, surveillance, the stack overflow podcast
13 Comments
Always makes me smile “democratic country”.
No country is a true democracy as said Rousseau. You just elect your masters, and then nothing.
To be more specific, you pick your masters from a pool of candidates validated by the press (and ultimately by the institutions that own them, usually banks). So it’s not even a free choice. Just the mere illusion of it.
this ^
Real problem is that no one can get tested until they exhibit covid symptoms, which is generally too late for everyone they know; without symptoms you cannot get tested per CDC guidelines. Basically just waiting on getting sick for 70% of the population is essentially the failed approach being used by U.S. leadership. No app is going to solve that issue. “Anyone who wants a test can get a test”. What a lie. While I appreciate the attempt at protecting civil liberties while testing an app which accesses everything it should never even dream of touching, there is no way to both protect users while at the same time exposing them to the most invasive tracking in history.
Solve testing, its much easier. Or just go straight to funding a vaccine, like Bill Gates.
But please, don’t act like spying on me is going to help. It’s insulting.
I was under the impression you can be a carrier of the virus and not be infected. Remember, there are 350million viruses in drop of ocean water. We harbor all manner of viruses. It is our immunity and the viruses make up that determines whern and if it turns “viral”.
Being a carrier of the virus and being infected is pretty much synonymous. What kind of dumb comment is this.
It’s hard to talk of “synonyms” when there is no common and accepted vocabulary (except in medical circles).
As far as “having the virus in your blood” is concerned, there is
– “having none whatsoever” (probably only people on Polar research stations would have that),
– “having negligible amounts of it, which are kept in check by your immune system or are just the advance troops and haven’t gotten much power yet”,
– “having enough of it that your outputs have high enough concentration of the virus that somebody else can get sick” (aka, an infectious person)
As far as “being sick” is concerned, there is
– “not gotten it at all”
– “gotten small enough amounts/is strong enough that there was few, if any, symptoms”
– “gotten visibly sick”
Status in the first list affects the status in the second list somewhat, but there are numerous possible combinations – and only a few widely-used pieces of terminology. “Sick” as “shows symptoms”, “Carrier” as “has infectious concentrations”, “Infected”… here’s a lot of grey area.
Presumably, what Mark meant was “you might not exhibit COVID symptoms, but still have the virus in your system”. Which has many implications: “a person with strong immunity can have the virus and even pass it on, but nobody will think of testing them”, “just the fact that a person has the virus or tests positive doesn’t necessarily make them sick”, “having some concentration of (any) virus in your body is not the end of the world – we all have LOTS of them, it’s the balance between viral attacks and immunity counterattacks that is important” – none of them dumb.
I have not trusted Bill Gates ever since he destroyed Netscape (a client of my former employer) via antitrust techniques and then tried to defeat the open source community.
Well, at best a vaccine is a blacklist (which is not the most effective approach against something that changes with every “system” it infects). At worst, it’s a trojan attack. Neither approach increases safety as much as a fully working immune system does – and that’s supported by varied diet, non-fanatical exercise, proper care of soil that grows the food (rather than Monsanto’s pesticide-rich ways) and other distinctly non-instant-gratification things Bill Gates is not funding.
I’m extremely dubious of Apple just building this into their mobile OS (as I understand it, Android will do so as an app download, Apple will just add it to devices in an update).
I want that capability to have a big OFF button, I want that to be the default, and I do not want the device merely stockpiling the data until it gets reset and defaults to “ON”.
What is the lifecycle for this tracking feature? When will Apple and Google remove it? Do I have the ability to completely remove it from my device at any point in time? When I purchase these devices, I do not do so with the intent of having them arbitrarily loaded with apps designed to trace my whereabouts; the podcast talks about piecing it together with ancillary sources.
And, like photo recognition, what is the guarantee that the capability won’t be abused by both corporate interest and law enforcement? Google is seriously not going to use this information to enhance their advertising revenue, which is the by-far primary source of their revenue?
Example of abuse: a crime was committed somewhere. Let’s use this capability to find out who was nearby and start getting statements from them. Send them the notification via an emergency channel text.
Not to mention, this requires a government and social commitment that has not transpired. If this becomes a fact of these devices, and everybody starts getting notifications that they were near a person that tested positive, where can they go to get tested? Do they get put on some kind of priority list? If there’s a run on a place that can provide testing in that area (and it would be in a focused area, that’s the point of the tracing), wouldn’t I be putting myself at risk by going to a place where people are strongly suspected of being exposed?
Strategically, I don’t see enough of the pieces in place to make this effective. It has a very strong “back door” smell, and in the era of Stellar Winds, that’s not paranoia.
We, as computer scientists and developers, have a moral responsibility to block any and all use of contact tracing. We know very well how evil it is and that it is just a giant ravenous wolf with a very thin veil of a sheep’s head. Don’t contribute, encourage, or aid this disgusting attempt.
Amen!
Hi, what I learned from the whole Corona crisis is that I can leave my smartphone at home when I go out.