Montreal City Weblog

Kate 17:29 on 2020-05-15 Permalink Reply  

• Faiz imam 18:08 on 2020-05-15 Permalink

  I hope they are using the Google/apple tech. I’ve studied it in great detail and its extremely elegant and well made. the tracing itself does not shed any private information. Totally anonymous. I have no issue installing it after having looked into it.

  if its not the google/apple API, its crap. Nothing else has the proper permissions from the OS to transmit at all times, so they have to always be running. Which is not gonna happen.

• Faiz imam 18:21 on 2020-05-15 Permalink

  Just to clarify, the API runs in the background, it’s used by an app that will be designed and run by a government agency (Montreal, regional, or Quebec).

  That agency could use the app to collect extra information that would be problematic.

  Well have to wait and see, but our health authorities already have a ton of info that they are required to protect, this seems no different.

• Kate 19:00 on 2020-05-15 Permalink

  Faiz Imam, what do you make of this story?

• Faiz imam 23:56 on 2020-05-15 Permalink

  LOL, that’s weak.

  Some wider context. Analog/manual contact tracing is basically detective work. Investigators talk to infected people and trace their path over the previous weeks to find other infected as early as possible, to limit the spead of the virus. It’s a time tested method and works very well. Places like korea and germany have thousands of investigators, and they get results.

  Quebec’s “system” is a small extension of the existing manual interview process were you submit the names of people you think you might have infected, which saves the investigators a little bit of time.

  The app based systems such as apple/google are also designed to be an extension of human investigators, but they are much more powerful because they don’t rely on faulty human memories.

  The quebec “system” such as it is, is fine. But its a very basic, simple thing that is not changing the situation much.

• Raymond Lutz 09:50 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  Contact tracing apps? Useless. C’est une fausse bonne idée qui m’a séduite aussi en premier lieu mais je citerai simplement cet interview:

  “My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.” source.

  While beeing on Schneier’s blog, don’t miss “Privacy vs. Surveillance in the Age of COVID-19” Fancy some Canadian content about tech, privacy and covid-19? Google “michael geist covid-19”

• JaneyB 12:53 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  Contact tracing apps should have been in place as soon as they shut the city down. There are apps that don’t compromise privacy that have been around for several weeks now eg: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/safepaths/overview/ Made by MIT/Harvard, it’s also free and open source. It seems to have been designed with the (properly) paranoid American user in mind.

  Apparently only 86% of Canadians have a smartphone. Fine, that’s still 86%. We’ll never have one solution that fits everyone. If we’re feeling ambitious, providing even a junky phone with some data to the other 14% would be less expensive than shutting everything down. Many of those people include the very old and are hopefully being watched by family members or institutions.

• Chris 18:18 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  >Contact tracing apps should have been in place as soon as they shut the city down

  No thanks. Some of us don’t want megacorps and/or governments tracking our every move.

• Faiz imam 20:13 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  Raymond, I read Bruce’s article when it first came out.

  While I respect him a lot on his area of specialization, its clear that he is no epidemiologist. (Of course neither am I)

  I see his critique as a “perfect being an enemy of the good”. contact tracing(distinct from tracking) is far from fool proof, but its a very powerful tool in the hands of investigators that can make them much more effective. That is a key part of the next phase of re-opening our society. If we loosen isolation procedures, we need to replace that with the most effective track, tracing and testing system possible.

  Brice seems to think these apps would work on their own, with no institutional framework. If that were the case I would agree with him. But that integration is going to be key.

  Chris. That’s a very important point. The apps that are currently out there by China, Singapore and Australia rely on GPS tracking that goes back to a central server. Its absolute worst case scenario for privacy.

  In contrast the google/apple API is totally different. Its “contact tracing”. To use a simple analogy its like a bee visiting flowers. You can examine the bee at the end of the day and know what flowers its visited due to the pollen stuck to it, but you will not get a exact trace of its activity.

  What we need is a list of all the devices a person has been near for a certain period of time. the API gives us that in a totally anonymous way.

  This graphic explains the tech quite well:

  https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/13D41/production/_111871218_contact-tracing_640v2-nc.png

• Raymond Lutz 21:53 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  Here’s some funnier comics explaining the protocol principles :How Privacy-Friendly Contact Tracing Can Help Stop the Spread of Covid-19. But cute comics don’t make good arguments… be sure to read until the end where some caveats were added by kottke.

• Faiz imam 00:34 on 2020-05-17 Permalink

  Wow, that comic is fantastic, I’m definitely going to forward it on to others. Much better than any of the others i’ve seen going around.

  The argument about trolling is exactly what I was talking about. The assumption is that this app is working on its own, and all users would have equal authority, like a social network.

  But in fact these apps will be closely managed by health authorities. infection notifications will not be sent by end users, but by medical staff after official confirmation.

  If there is any leakage of information, it must be by the app and apart from the API.

  most of the nations using it that have seen have made the app open source, or at least uber transparent, and have advocated for a privacy first attitude.

  I’m wary of that changing, but at this point it looks like these apps are on the right track.

• ant6n 18:32 on 2020-05-17 Permalink

  I dunno. I was thinking of considering the contact tracing apps, but after this “discussion” I feel icky about it.

• Raymond Lutz 12:05 on 2020-06-23 Permalink

  Old thread but pour ceux qui veulent approfondir le sujet (electronic tracing of population) moi j’ai pas le temps: j’ai un chauffe-eau à remplacer. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5820 C’est un peu plus développé que la critique ‘agnostique’ de Bruce Schneier du #ContactTracing