If you don't want to participate in contact tracing, just stay home.
The people who get sick and die because of your untraceable contacts are your problem.
The people who get sick and die because of your untraceable contacts are your problem.
> In addition to having to install the app, students were told they are not allowed to leave campus for the duration of the semester without permission over fears that contact with the wider community might bring the virus back to campus.
Tracking location isn't necessary to conduct contact tracing, as demonstrated by Canada's "COVID Alert" app:
> The app is designed to notify users when they’ve been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
> However, it does not track a user’s location itself, or use GPS.
> Instead, the app produces random codes, and uses Bluetooth to ping other users’ phones and exchange these codes whenever two people who have the app are physically near one another.
> https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/canadian-privacy-w...
So let's not conflate the issues here. This app doesn't exist primarily for "contact tracing"; if it were, they would not need to collect location data. This is about geofencing students.
It's also premised on the idea that the interior of the campus perimeter represents a safe "sterile zone". This is obviously false. A student could show up on day one infected but with a negative test result. Professors and other staff members are free to leave the campus. Presumably vendors (food, cleaning, maintenance, supplies) will come and go. Solely restricting the movement of students is not going to prevent an outbreak.
There was a long and heated discussion about making this app as privacy focused as possible while still being useful, and it seems to have struck a reasonable compromise. Why can't the college's contact tracing app do something similar?
And while I am a user of the German app, because i value the upsides of contact tracing, I would do everything possible to not be monitored 24/7 by such a campus spyware.
That means there is no such option as "follow the rules or death". It's a false narrartive pushed by people who want to shame those who don't follow the rules. We may feel a need to "do something" and that may make us feel better, but that doesn't eman that it works.
Luckily the death rates aren't that different from a regular flu. Of course people die from that too. That's tragic, but everybody dies so there is no option of death or not death. The only question is how we die. For examples, the measures taken against the virus have killed people. How many? No government that I know of is tracking this.
I respect your right to have a differing opinion, but as far as they go, yours is a very strong opinion that you are too confident in without sufficient evidence.
Respectfully, this is dangerous bullshit, and doesn't even make sense. The virus spread initially in a world without countermeasures. With countermeasures that reduce Re... if every infected person spreads it to less than one person on average, the spread on a population level stops. That's sort of the point. I'd highly suggest playing around with a cellular automaton or something to get a sense for super- v.s. subcriticality.
> That's tragic, but everybody dies so there is no option of death or not death. The only question is how we die.
Sure, I'm going to die someday with exceedingly high probability, but even though I know that, I haven't shot myself. And I wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle. I don't have any hard data to back this up, but I suspect the majority of people would prefer to die later rather than sooner. If you'd like to fund a poll to investigate this question, please feel free.
If you don't think these apps will be used
1) during wartime
2) to track political dissidents
3) to gather data on interactions between people in a country for things like 'urban planning'
4) as a monetized version of each of these
To be clear, I'm not advocating for teenagers to all sneak off and mingle at this time. But they are going to do it anyway, regardless of what I think, and this app isn't going to stop them.
The college, however, can pat themselves on the back and call it a victory.