Surveillance in the Name of Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance in the Name of Covid-19

restofworld.org

34 pointsleoschwartz11 comments

I'm aware of the insidious nature of governmental encroachment upon our electronic freedom, but part of me feels that we should just pay Uber and Lyft to set up an app for scheduling at-home (front porch) vaccinations by nurses in a van.

There has got to be SOME allowance for information tech to help solve problems in the gray area between government surveillance and personal obscurity.

As my man Lt. Worf says, “trust is earned, not given”. I have the canadian covid tracing app on my phone because they have gone far to prove that it’s not being used maliciously or easily coopted. The same cannot be said for uber and lyft, who would have to show deep data protection / separation efforts before i’d consider trusting them with anything vaguely medical.

Ontario police were using data collected in the name of COVID-19 outside of its intended purpose: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-police-database...

It took the legal action of Human Rights organizations to end their access to it.

Upsetting, but seems to be not directly related to the contact tracing app

You would have a problem with a hospital (or CVS) using rideshare to come to your house and give you a vaccine that could potentially help you keep your elderly relatives alive? There's not much extra surveillance fruit in them knowing where you are when you get a vaccine that is going to be given to a third of the population anyway.

If you're a user of their apps, Uber and Lyft have already been trusted with your payment information, name, address, work address, home address, friends' addresses, weekend destinations, mobile phone location data, etc.

I guess this is what I mean: there's a huge additional burden that results from the gut reaction to treat all government-endorsed information sharing as a nonstarter. I could put some freezers in a van and spend the day driving nurses from house to house, vaccinating the citizenry, but all these perfect-world objections force the plan back into its hole instead of getting the job done.

Yes i would have a problem with the gov giving a massive vaccine delivery contract to uber or lyft - privacy issues notwithstanding, their labour practices alone would be an issue.

And it’s actually a really simple problem, not some fantasy perfect world thing - pass a law that requires private companies to limit the data they collect on people, treat the data they collect carefully, and allows me to opt out. Then you can give that kind odlf contract to whomeever - since i no longer have to trust the company to “do the right thing”

A step in the right direction. We could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide with better contact tracing.

I suppose it depends where you are. In the United States, if we had this Singapore-style surveillance mechanism, what would we do with the data? How would it be used to save hundreds of thousands? Would we implement arrest and detention for those who had had 30 minutes of contact within 2 meters of a presumed positive case?

Check the European standards for covid-19 tracing apps: those don't collect any personal data.

This is exactly the same argument made by more totalitarian regimes. According to them, they do it for "saving lives".

Hundreds of thousands of lives in exchange for compulsory surveillance seems like a pretty bad deal in a world with 6 billion people.

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