The UK government doesn't even trust itself with test and trace data privacy: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54328644
Without privacy guarantees people don't use it. If people don't use it the whole system fails.
Without privacy guarantees people don't use it. If people don't use it the whole system fails.
That being said, I haven't installed the app. I know I "should", but I just do not trust it. I've completely and utterly lost all faith in the government, and although I have the .apk executable sitting in my downloads folder just waiting for me to disassemble it and read through it myself, I haven't yet.
It's almost as if decades of sophisticated spying and "dark practices" have conditioned the entirety of the UK to not trust their government, or something. I use a VPN (or three) at home, tor where appropriate, and root my phone and cut out the Google dial-home. It's a very big ask to get me to install a government-developed application. I just have a deep, probably irrational, fear of it watching everything I do.
(This is for England only, I have no idea what the rest of the UK is up to)
The algorithm the app uses is pretty simple and in your case would be going off like a siren nearly daily. It announces itself in the vicinity via bluetooth and listens for similar announcements. Each device has a random, self generated ID and this is changed regularly. If someone gets a positive test and reports via the app then their ID at the time is sent out. Apps will compare their list of known IDs and times they were seen with the positive list. Basically if your app decides that it saw a "positive" ID for something like 15 minutes or more then it will flag it to you. Then it is up to you whether to isolate, get tested etc. It is not an offence to ignore the app but it is if you ignore an official Check and Trace operative.
This is why you are told not to use it at work. The algorithm is designed to work for people going about "normal" life and your life in the NHS is not normal. It can't possibly work for you or my cousin working as a matron in a hospital. The algorithm basically measures exposure and the current thinking is that 15 mins is long enough to flag a warning. So don't stop and chat for ages in the supermarket/park/pub or whatever to your mates - say hi and use a phone later. If you do go to a pub or restaurant then you have to accept that there is a risk.
If you are worried about the sign in QR code thing not having a sign out until midnight, you can create your own home "sign in" to do the same job. See https://www.gov.uk/create-coronavirus-qr-poster .
There is no need for conspiracy theories! The source code is on Github so no need to mess with the apk. You may want to check that the source generates the .apk though. I'm not a fan of some things that have been done here but the new app is the right way to do it in my opinion. It's very, very simple and has no personally identifiable data involved. It's basically one simple rule of thumb that is good enough to semi-automate part of the C&T function. It is not good enough for your trade though and you should not use it at work.
Stay safe.
The vast vast majority of people don't know anything about privacy guarantees and this does not factor into their decisions in any way.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/file...
So no, you're extremely wrong.
What do people really care about and will actually action? Very different to what you think.
Turns out 99% will use Google and Facebook and crack on despite the tracking and not really care about it.
I mean, yes, I get the strong impression you don't care.
I really struggle to believe that 20% of people have heard of Snowden in any meaningful way to form an opinion.
I'm picturing 20% of the people who live on my street. When I talk to them I don't get the impression most of them follow the news in that much depth. Many have been retired and zoned out from any kind of public life for many years. (Not a criticism - maybe they have other interests than me. Maybe they're happier than me for that?)
> I get the strong impression you don't care.
No, sorry you've imagine that out of nowhere. It isn't implied by anything I've said - I haven't talked about my personal beliefs at all.
I'm just a realist about what the people around me outside the tech and media bubble are reading and thinking.
Do you live on a street in the Valley with 100 Google engineers? Most people don't.
72% in the UK.
>Do you live on a street in the Valley
You don't... really believe in polling do you?
People say all kinds of things in response to polling. That's why polling gets it wrong again and again. For example... the 2016 election.
Guess what: phone my 90 year old neighbours with a question about Edward Snowden... they aren't going to even pick up the phone!
Look at what people PRACTICALLY do rather than what they poll to do. You'll find it doesn't match.
That's correct. The US is currently conducting a poll to decide most of the composition of its government (including some local and many national political positions) and as you claim, the voters will say "all kinds of things".
But the answers stick anyway. Even though they say "all kinds of things" you live in a democracy and those "all kinds of things" decides the rules. Now, given that I'd be trying to maybe get them to say smarter things, but if you prefer to just smirk about it I cannot stop you.
I don't understand where this snark is coming from?
Am I saying something that you don't wish was true?
The reality is... most people out there don't care about privacy nor Snowden. The reality is most of them are trying to make enough to feed their families this week plus pay their bills and don't have the energy to think about anything else. I'm not smirking about it. I didn't express any opinion about it. I'm telling you the facts!
Are you assuming I think this is good? Where did you read that? You've imagined it!
You're confusing a reality check with an opinion on how I think things should be!
This is a bizarre question. They predicted Clinton would win. She didn’t.
People stopped using it because it stopped being a good way to keep in touch with friends and instead became a Bazaare containing every single person you've ever met for a millisecond. People no longer felt connected, and gravitated to more curated communication channels where they could choose who they talk to.
I'm sure people say it's important in the abstract, but not in practice, and not right now.
Covid risks are _way_ lower here than risks of random creeps misusing names/numbers of women...
I'm less affected by those particular risks, but I still use a burner Twilio SMS number and a burner gmail address that doesn't get used for anything else, with plus addressing to help try identify where a leak happened. If that account starts getting spam to nomdeplume+somesmallbar@gmail.com or nomdeplume+someQRcodesigninservice@gmail.com, I might get a smoking gun about who leaked it.
If the spammers are cleaning their lists of that well-enough-known email tracking trick and sending enough smtp to make the address a problem to use, I can just walk away from that gmail account and set up a new one.
I'm contemplating building an automated system of "rolling 4 week validity email addresses" that I can easily enough work out on-the-spot, perhaps month/week-of-month encoding so I'd use nomdeplume-102+randombar@example.org this week (102 being october 2nd week) and only have the addresses live long enough for contact tracing purposes. Perhaps using something t5hat works the same as gmail's "plus addressing" but different enough that spammers list cleaning tools won't know about it. That'd involve running my own mail server though, and the risks here right now are so low (in the single digit cases per day in a city of 5million people) that I'm more motivated to just lie on the contact forms instead...
From the linked web page: "sample size 1006 respondents". Given the UK population of around 68 million that seems a small sample.
"Privacy" is not an abstract generic concept. It is context and consequence dependent.
When "contact data" has the monetary and social value associated with a mandatory 14-day quarantine, people accurately consider restrictions on future movement, not privacy. Those who don't, quickly learn the hard way or from a friend. They don't need the word "privacy", only "don't do that again".
Where I live people put their full names, email addresses and phone numbers happily down on on a piece of paper for everyone to see!
> "Privacy" is not an abstract generic concept.
It is to these people!
I don't get why you're being so snarky - it's actually against the rules here.
People are sharing names, email addresses and phone numbers based on assumptions and models of reality developed over many years, e.g. they have experienced zero observable consequences from all previous sharing of this information. Based on their historical observations, it's not illogical to continue sharing.
But policy has changed in 2020. Now the data goes into databases with a physical consequence: temporary blacklisting from work, play, school, travel, even non-essential medical treatment.
This is why people who have already been contact traced (they are already experiencing and learning the consequences) have been reluctant to give the names of their close contacts, because they know personally the consequences that will be imposed on their contacts, facilitated by their disclosure of contact names.
Until people have this first-hand learning experience, it's difficult to put the data in context. Most importantly, being contact traced does not mean they are sick or will get sick from the (possibly symptom-free and false-positive PCR test) contact being traced, yet they and their contacts would be asked to pay an expensive price.
It's really unfortunate that much of the spreading of Covid-19 may be people with no symptoms, who believe incorrectly that because they have no symptoms, they don't have it, can't have it, present no risk to anyone and certainly aren't spreading the virus.
A friend tells me they have a friend who insists on hanging out because "I can't have it, I don't have any symptoms".
Did they? Ask your woman friends. I'll bet a _lot_ of them are using fake details. They have genuine threat models that the sort of people who decide "lets just have a piece of paper with everybody's name and phone number at the front door" never have to think about.
None of these other grey market data collection firms have to do any of that. One thing I noticed is these guys are collecting data that would fall under HIPPA.
Go ahead do some searches for Hepatitis C and then look at your ads on Facebook.