Google and Apple is this the End of Privacy as we know it?

Expert in Digital Technologies Nicolas Babin shares some insight around these very important topics.

We are in a crisis and need a balance between privacy and safety?
Data quality – when reporting infections and deaths
retirement homes, nursing and private homes.
The UK does not, the U.S. does not. Many countries do not.

Contact tracing Apple and Google
Phase 1: Downloadable apps for tracing – Bluetooth location sharing, not the same as GPS??

While the app regularly sends information out over Bluetooth, it broadcasts an anonymous key, rather than a static identity, and those keys cycle every 15 minutes to preserve privacy.

Very useful resource here if you want to delve into this even deeper! 😉

Even once a person shares that they’ve been infected,
the app will only share keys from the specific period in which they were contagious.

Phase 2: Build into operating systems (all features will be opt-in) – Mid June
Once they have delivered what they are saying they will do, will we be forced to opt in?

Making data available to public authorities is obviously a great thing,
but to whom will it be made available to after and being managed??

Anonymised, who gets hold of this data and how and in what form can they see the picture?
Can I opt in or out?
If not why not, have we now lost data privacy?

Temperature checks – Contact Log
Contact tracing Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, as well as Kerala, India.
Experience gained from SARS in 2003 was very valuable.
South Koreans exposed to the virus must download so they can be monitored during self quarantine.

Balance between Health – community wellbeing and privacy (individual rights).
Abundance of data we create and how it could hurt us or help us.

The data we are creating of course should be anonymous unless we have a role in spreading a virus. Then this becomes big brother using the data we create for the better good.

Contact tracing has been used to stamp out diseases way before data was created on this mass scale and can now be augmented with the new data led approach, this old fashioned methodology of manual contact tracing is still important for the people who are not opted in and don’t want to be on the radar.

Community hot spot identification and specific community level strategies are important, for one example:- changing the layout of parks to reduce congestion.

Speed is crucial with catching this virus spread and all methods need to be combined to provide the fastest results.

Caution is bias that will exist if only a small proportion of people use the apps, and without mass adoption the problems could be huge.

As in the most vulnerable members of society. Communities not using these apps could get no help at all, which is my fear in poorer areas.

Certain apps and devices are more widely used by affluent and younger communities, Stacey Gray, senior counsel for the Future of Privacy Forum, told lawmakers. That could leave out some of the most vulnerable segments of the population.

“This includes underrepresentation of the elderly, very young or lowest-income people who do not own cell-phones, or anyone who does not own a cellphone for other reasons, such as refusal on religious grounds,” Gray said in her testimony to Congress on Thursday.

Will Strafach, CEO of mobile security company Guardian, explained how it was very simple to fake and scale up with botnets using spoofed identifiers sending altered data to the trackers’ servers. This doesn’t usually happen because in the past, all that it would really affect is what kinds of ads are sent to people’s phones.

But if it can affect government policy, malicious actors could take advantage of this vulnerability, Strafach warned.

Efficient monitoring without being too obtrusive – Genevieve Bell is director of the Autonomy, Agency, and Assurance Institute at the Australian National University and a senior fellow at Intel.

We need mass surveillance to fight covid-19—but it doesn’t have to be creepy.

Some of the other resources I read are here: –


https://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-coronavirus-surveillance-new-powers

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/10/21216484/google-apple-coronavirus-contract-tracing-bluetooth-location-tracking-data-app

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/12/999186/covid-19-contact-tracing-surveillance-data-privacy-anonymity/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689

https://www.cnet.com/news/location-data-brokers-say-they-can-help-contain-covid-19-heres-why-thats-a-problem/