UKC

What do we think? I wouldn't like the precedent but... 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52095331

Maybe they could just start with this part 

If a person starts feeling ill, it is suggested they use the app to request a home test.

Wouldn’t really work unless everyone is enrolled. The location data is already collected anyway, just can’t be legally used. 

No, but if it was made compulsory?

Isn't part of the problem, now it is so well established in the country, that there are so many asymptomatic people? This strikes me as something that needed to happen from person 1 surely? 

I suspect something like this will become compulsory once the antibody test becomes available widespread. Something that becomes a permit to move around rather than the other way round. 

So you think that if you can prove you have anitbodies then you could be permitted to go on with life but if not you stay in lockdown? Sounds great, but my first thought is that I fancy my chances of survival with the virus, so if I had no antibodies then I could try to get infected so I can go back to work! I suspect I wouldn't be the only one to think that! There's going to need to be some pretty serious financial incentives to stop people going down that line. (I wouldn't actually go out of my way to get infected, I'm not that desperate, but many are and would do it on purpose)

I question how well it’ll really work.  

Most infections will happen indoors, GNSS sucks arse indoors, and most places don’t have indoor beacon based micro-navigation, nor is there a universal standard for that.  Unless people correctly scan QR codes into and out of every single room it’s basically a source of noise.  

An actually workable system would have to do phone-to-phone proximity detection and again lack of standards is a problem.  Apple have this down pat with “AirDrop” but there’s no universal standard.

I think that other measures such as pervasive thermal imaging based fever detection and phone based heart rate detection would do a lot more (A mobile phone camera pressed into a finger with the illumination LED on can do chroma oximetry based pulse detection very well).

China are rolling out an app like the one you link to.  I don’t imagine it will be long before it’s used to identify candidates for their reeducation camps.  

deliberately trying to 'acquire' the virus is a bit of a Russian roulette idea considering it can be fatal to some people irrespective of age. Sadly a 13 year old has died of the disease now. 

Yes, and I'm not desperate enough to try it. But stats are such that many will get away with it, so desperate people will try it!

Sadly I agree with you. I just hope those daft enough to try don't become more statistics. Or spread it even more.

So I was in Sainsbury's today, and pretty much the only message over the PA system was, please sign up to our suck your brains out Smart checkout system so you can check out with the minimum social contact. Download the app now.

I'm not a great fan of loyalty systems, you have probably figured that out. My take was, they they are taking the opportunity to provide great isolation - in return for your detailed shopping and location data.

This is a tricky one. For online shopping , I take the view, so what will they learn? They will find out what I hover over, what I buy. Mostly they offer me things I have bought before (hello, I've already bought them). 

Here's the deal. They are not interested in me. They are interested in *selling me*, what I buy, where I hover, where I click, to whoever will buy that information.

Actually, my detailed supermarket shopping , I'll keep that for me. I have no idea why that is, but it seems pretty personal. Number of wine bottles, dietary choices, number of loo rolls. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive.

Or it is not used as a reason to allow some people out of lockdown but not others. Or people who test negative to antibodies get paid well (at least as much as they would normally earn, not 80%) to stay home and have guarantees that their work will still be available for them when lockdown does end. It has to not disadvantage someone

Do you pay by cash? 

Short of walking into a virus ward, which I suspect isn’t the easiest thing to do right now, how would you go about trying to get infected?

It's going to be a lot easier in a couple of weeks...

I like my badge idea better

1. Everybody gets one, you don't need to have to own a smartphone.

2. An e-ink screen is zero power and always on, can't really use a phone like a badge. 

3. Low power and no apps etc means it doesn't need charged all the time.  Much less electronics so it can be thinner and lighter than a phone.

4. Harder to fake than a screen on your own phone.

5. low range Bluetooth is more suitable for contact tracing because it works inside buildings and public transport and is far more accurate at determining proximity than GPS

Of course the downside is you need to design and build the badges which will take months and cost money.  No reason not to start with an app and supplement with badges later.

If it is as infectious as we are led to believe, you go to a supermarket and touch every surface you can find and lick your fingers? Or convince a friend that has it to let you come over. You basically don't adhere to what we are being asked to do, which will be easier to get away with if others are out and about and not having to adhere to it!

Unless you pay by cash every time they have that data about you anyway.

Genuinely baffled why anyone would care that this data is being collected. The supermarkets use the data to optimise their supply chains and - potentially - better target their marketing. That’s pretty much it.

If anyone has examples of this data being used for evil, (sic), please share?

Apple actually have a better system than this for this purpose. The ‘find my stuff’ function that lets you find your phone/laptop etc also works for things like AirPods (provided something wakes them up and they’re not flat obviously) as they will use an internet connected device to relay the position data back to you.

Even better, Apple devices will use other people’s devices as a relay, so if you lose your AirPod out running then the next Apple device that comes in range will relay an encrypted message updating you on where your item is. 

Are you going to buy and equip everyone with a smart phone with gps sensors? Including all the kids and then its making sure people carry the phone at all times. For example if I go for a run I dont carry my phone and for a ride often dont bother (depends if i remember to stick it in my pocket or not).

It would be interesting to see the risk of false positives as well. If I am waiting at the station whilst the direct train passes through. How not to trigger for everyone?

wintertree: For fever detection isnt the issue quite a few people dont have one at all and those who do may have for only part of the time they are infectious.

Heartrate are similar prone of mismeasurement unless its really kicked in especially if you arent consistently measuring. I did have a bug earlier in the year/maybe end of last year which was visible in the garmin stress reading and heartrate but then again I have also had hangovers showing much the same.

I think there’s a lot of people who don’t seem to understand the basics of virus transmission and why we are washing our hands. 
 

Keep up the paranoia, you and Tom are certainly entertaining me. 

You’d have to change your behaviour. I am now carrying my phone out on a run, essentially because my club changed policy that all coaches leading sessions needed to carry them after we had a serious incident. It’s now just second nature. 
 

Most people have phones, don’t need to be very sophisticated, doesn’t use GPS it uses mast triangulation to make sure you’re within a certain area. Remember we aren’t trying to stop everyone from leaving their house, we are trying to limit social contact and the time spent away from their house. 
 

If your phone doesn’t show up on the network, or shows up 50 miles from home, someone will call you and ask what you’re doing. 

If it worked, it may be a sensible option.  As in my OP though, I don't like the idea for other reasons.  It's hardly more onerous than carrying an ID card as is required in some countries.

Network triangulation isn't useful for contact tracing, it's too blunt an instrument, particularly in cities.

No, I do get it. And I get that if people stop washing their hands and start trying to be around infected people then they increase their chances of getting infected! And if you don't think people will be that desperate then you are deluded! 

So what are you trying to do with this?

Identify if people have stepped outside your preapproved zone or trace contacts?

If the former then yes although you would need to explain the gains to this big brother state?

If the latter than phone triangulation is bugger all use. Maybe if the entire country had 5g since that has far smaller cells. It is generally accurate within about 1/2 to 1 square mile depending on the provisioning. Me sneezing could be rather inconvenient for a lot of people with that accuracy.

What is most interesting to me about this system is that it was built from the ground up on cryptographic principles, rather than being built on the ground up as utility onto which someone then tried (and inevitably failed) to bolt sufficient security.   So it’s actually got a good chance of doing this stuff (for lost devices or for infection) without compromising individual privacy, unlike the more genetic “app based” approach being suggested.

You nearly lost me by starting with a “So”; then when you added the “Here’s the deal” you did lose me. Who says “here’s the deal” unironically in 2020? 

Everyone has got to stop washing their hands and sneezing on a lot of surfaces. You then have to be pretty lucky (or unlucky) to find some viable virus to scoop up. 
 

The virus is being transmitted by ‘close personal contact’. To think that people in large numbers will start looking for people with confirmed virus and that their friends will let them pop round to catch it is just pie in the sky thinking. There are fines and prison sentences in the offering for that kind of behaviour and if that’s not a big enough disincentive( Yesterday two healthy teenagers died. How desperate do you need to be? 

Keeping people inside a reasonably small area so they can exercise and pop to the shops. Rather than go on camping trips to Edale. 
 

I’m thinking about when restrictions start to be eased off. Particularly dealing with those who have tested immune being more useful in society and be able to travel unrestricted. Having some way to dissuade and prevent others from trying it on. 

I think tracking individual cases is over now. 

If someone is wondering around in a big city, contact tracing is impossible to manage. Are you going to lock down several tube trains full of passengers for 14 days on the off chance someone may have coughed on someone. GPS won’t work on underground, let alone individual section of carriages. 

Okay so you are proposing something completely different from what the government is proposing.

So for your allowing "immune people" to move around. Isnt that punishing those who took safeguards originally or were just unlucky. How long would you keep this up for bearing in mind you give an ever increasing incentive to gamble on not being one of those who will be severely affected.

I assumed that network triangulation worked in cities as it doesn’t work well in rural areas. I have the Friend Locator app installed on my phone as I have a health condition and (normally) pick my grandson up from school. My thinking was that my son could check that I had picked him up. When I have been out with the dogs I have looked at the map data and the accuracy is laughable. It doesn’t help that I can’t listen to the radio using the internet when out, as the signal is mostly nonexistent.

The other thing I find strange is that a while ago people resisted the imposition of ID cards but are now prepared to consider mass surveillance using a far more invasive method.

There's no completely safe solution from a privacy perspective but there are better and worse ways of implementing it. I think if it's viewed like vaccination: optional but only reasonably effective once very widely adopted then it could be tolerable. It's not like the state and the service providers don't potentially have access to this data already. We surrender a lot of privacy when we choose to own a phone, we just never really got round to thinking about it because change came incrementally with benefits and the privacy loss is a largely hypothetical side effect of the technology, not the primary purpose.

I can see it rapidly running into tech issues, insufficient local storage for an adequately deep database being the first that springs to mind on cluttered older phones.

I'd use it if it were well thought out and effective, benefits outweigh the costs as I see it but then my life is boring with little to hide.

jk

Unless you habitually pay cash they already get the vast majority of the information you don't want them to have.

jk

Punishing? 
 

Are we currently punishing people who are not essential workers? 

Contactless

What makes you believe that?

I apologise for my inappropriate use of English.

If you go back for a refund, they can bring up what you bought on their computer using your card details. That’s possible on pretty much every shop system. Even if you go back to a different branch. Try it. 

Can you identify what that vast majority is? It seems a number of posters agree with you.

Indeed, and of course they will aggregate anonymous card numbers (no loyalty card presented) and purchases to identify trends, but their systems are not allowed to identify you. That's why the loyalty card system is necessary.

I'm aware I'm probably being a bit last century

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/08/supermarkets-get-your-data

That's a good article. Note this section:

"A Waitrose spokesperson says the supermarket would never see details about an individual customer's spending – the data would only show broad trends. Along with Visa, the supermarket emphasises that the work fully complied with the Data Protection Act"

As posted above, they are allowed to track your purchases anonymously. If you're interested, I'll look out the technical spec that the card systems are required to comply with.

You mean you're not logging every movement on Strava...?

They probably don't have your name or address associated with your basket but anyone interested in (illegally) pulling together more than one set of data could readily connect you to your shopping habits via your card.

jk

Not last century, just oddly trusting in some ways yet oddly concerned in others. As you said, the supermarket isn't the issue, it's your data being lost or deliberately traded onward. Mostly it's low value information but might for example your shopping habits be of interest to a life or health insurer and will the middle man they buy data from be so scrupulous about not combining data sets to deanonymise them? Eschewing loyalty cards (I do too, can't be arsed with them) is no defence in the age of card payments, we're reliant on the law to protect us from unscrupulous or careless data abuse.

jk

Don’t they use the loyalty card so that you can use different payment methods?

The bank knows where you’ve used your cards. 

never. True athletes dont bother with that sort of thing. I take a photo of the sun at the beginning and end and then work out the speed on a map using a pencil.

Quickly takes off and hides my garmin watch.

You should have confidence in (at least the larger) organisations, as there are very strict and audited legal requirements for payment systems. Search PCI DSS if you're interested; their quick reference guide is only slightly horrendous.

The loyalty card is their let-out for the above, and by using it you give them your explicit permission to use your data, in return for the well-publicised rewards etc. If the privacy issues don't worry you, go for it!

Smaller businesses may be more susceptible to the bad guys, but since nearly everyone uses some kind of remote payment system these days, hopefully it's a thing of the past.

Contactless payment gives you another level of security (or depending on your paranoia, another level of organisations sucking out your brains), as their payment systems don't give the retailer any payment information at all. I haven't looked into whether the transaction id provided to them is unique to you; if it is, that could be used in the same way as a card number.

I agree that there is a huge incentive for aggregators to provide saleable information about you that is as focused as possible, and where that is done, it is a big infringement on your privacy. It's a bit of an arms race, but the good guys are out there fighting for us!

ff

That’s interesting. So, if you buy something on contactless, and you opt not to take a paper receipt, you’re going to have difficulty returning it if it’s faulty etc?

That would be a good experiment. I always get a paper receipt, and have always assumed I would need it if I take stuff back.

I’ll ask my daughter she works in a clothing shop where most people seem to wear a dress once and then return it. 😂

Of course, I have double standards going on. My Amazon account for example...

EU-US Privacy Shield anyone? Sure thing.

Maybe.  A few years ago I was shocked when my phone got my location right to within maybe 20m in Germany with the GPS switched off.

There are a lot of WiFi routers in cities and allegedly the Google  StreetView cars have/had WiFi sniffers as well as cameras so they can use WiFi beacon signals for geolocation.

Technically, if you built up a geographic database of WiFi router signal strength you could probably do pretty OK.   Maybe even inside buildings if you were government and could force BT etc. to tell you the address each router was in.

Next step: using the open mic required for 'Hey Siri', 'OK Google' and 'Alexa' to listen for coughing.   If your phone hears continuous coughing you are out.

That's worked for years.  Google collect the data of the location of specific wifi networks from phones which have both wifi and GPS on - it's been going for far longer than the StreetView cars being a thing.  First time I noticed it was about 10 years ago.

But even that isn't accurate enough to know if I've had contact with someone.  My wifi can be picked up from the road outside (the phone picks it up in the car before I drive off).  But someone walking past the front of my house has probably not had contact.

I think you're rather missing the main point - dumbphones.

That’s what a watch is for!