paul later clarified that he was baffled that people attempting to get around this system would knowingly leave their homes with their phones when they were aware it was being used to track them. this was a misleading swipe.
you also recently referred to Apple’s “newfound” advocacy for privacy. this message is over 10 years old and therefore that adjective is false by any reasonable interpretation of the semantics of “newfound”
you could actually argue that this has been their message all along since 1977, a _personal_ computer liberated from the centralized servers of yesterday’s IBM and today’s Google
just playing your future nyt editor! i’m sure they will be much less strict than i am. why i read the ft tbh :D
here is an example of such a person. what’s interesting here is simultaneously an answer to paul’s question. a feature originally designed to protect privacy (expiring location tracking), actually facilitates surveillance, as the lack of such tracking reveals that an individual is not at home to reactivate it
>Having been quarantined at his parents’ house in the Hebei province in northern China for a month, Elvis Liu arrived back home in Hong Kong on February 23rd. Border officials told him to add their office’s number to his WhatsApp contacts and to fix the app’s location-sharing setting to “always on”, which would let them see where his phone was at all times. They then told him to get home within two hours, close the door and stay there for two weeks.
>His next fortnight was punctuated, every eight hours, with the need to reactivate that always-on location sharing; Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, requires such affirmation so people do not just default to being tracked. Compared with his first lockdown—in a spacious apartment, with family and dogs for company—the ten-square-metre flat with two tiny courtyard-facing windows was grim. When he emerged, on March 8th, he immediately donned mask, goggles and gloves and took a ferry to the island of Lamma where he galloped down lush forest trails for 30km, high on freedom, injuring his knees in the process. He still has trouble sleeping.
you’d like this article i think. here’s a great highlight on the contrast of Eastern mores with American ones.
>What Google and Facebook will not do, though, the government of Singapore is quite up for. Its Government Technology Agency and health ministry have designed an app which can retrospectively identify close-ish contacts of people who come down with covid-19.
>When two users of this new app, called TraceTogether, are within two metres of each other their phones get in touch via Bluetooth. If the propinquity lasts for 30 minutes both phones record the encounter in an encrypted memory cache. When someone with the app is diagnosed with the virus, or identified as part of a cluster, the health ministry instructs them to empty their cache to the contact-tracers, who decrypt it and inform the other party. It is especially useful for contacts between people who do not know each other, such as fellow travellers on a bus, or theatre-goers.
>The app’s developers have tried to assuage concerns about privacy and security. Downloading it is not compulsory. Phone numbers are stored on a secure server, and are not revealed to other users. Geolocation data are not collected (though Google’s rules governing apps that use Bluetooth mean that they will be stored on Android phones running the app). They are planning to publish the app’s source code and make it free to reuse, so that others may capitalise on their work.
>Singaporeans trust their government. Since TraceTogether was released on March 20th it has been downloaded by 735,000 people, or 13% of the population, according to government data. Several Singaporeans your correspondent spoke to one overcast day in the business district were unaware that they could be prosecuted for refusing to hand over their data to the health ministry. But they had no intention of frustrating the authorities. “I’d rather be responsible than irresponsible,” said one trader.
paul later clarified that he was baffled that people attempting to get around this system would knowingly leave their homes with their phones when they were aware it was being used to track them. this was a misleading swipe.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1241701618355142658?s=21
you also recently referred to Apple’s “newfound” advocacy for privacy. this message is over 10 years old and therefore that adjective is false by any reasonable interpretation of the semantics of “newfound”
https://youtu.be/39iKLwlUqBo
hai!
- atec
" this message is over 10 years old", sure but the marketing around it is extremely recent, as of 2-3 years ago.
“(if you trust Apple’s newfound market-based commitment to privacy)”
https://vicki.substack.com/p/keybase-and-the-chaos-of-crypto
i’m not sure “market-based commitment”, (or for that matter, “marketing”), means “ad campaign”. i would include any public statements the CEO makes to the press (particularly Jobs, surely you’ll agree with that) as “marketing”. (here’s Tim Cook making similar noises back in 2014: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/tim-cook-to-google-users-youre-not-the-customer-youre-the-product-594242)
you could actually argue that this has been their message all along since 1977, a _personal_ computer liberated from the centralized servers of yesterday’s IBM and today’s Google
just playing your future nyt editor! i’m sure they will be much less strict than i am. why i read the ft tbh :D
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/03/26/countries-are-using-apps-and-data-networks-to-keep-tabs-on-the-pandemic
here is an example of such a person. what’s interesting here is simultaneously an answer to paul’s question. a feature originally designed to protect privacy (expiring location tracking), actually facilitates surveillance, as the lack of such tracking reveals that an individual is not at home to reactivate it
>Having been quarantined at his parents’ house in the Hebei province in northern China for a month, Elvis Liu arrived back home in Hong Kong on February 23rd. Border officials told him to add their office’s number to his WhatsApp contacts and to fix the app’s location-sharing setting to “always on”, which would let them see where his phone was at all times. They then told him to get home within two hours, close the door and stay there for two weeks.
>His next fortnight was punctuated, every eight hours, with the need to reactivate that always-on location sharing; Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, requires such affirmation so people do not just default to being tracked. Compared with his first lockdown—in a spacious apartment, with family and dogs for company—the ten-square-metre flat with two tiny courtyard-facing windows was grim. When he emerged, on March 8th, he immediately donned mask, goggles and gloves and took a ferry to the island of Lamma where he galloped down lush forest trails for 30km, high on freedom, injuring his knees in the process. He still has trouble sleeping.
you’d like this article i think. here’s a great highlight on the contrast of Eastern mores with American ones.
>What Google and Facebook will not do, though, the government of Singapore is quite up for. Its Government Technology Agency and health ministry have designed an app which can retrospectively identify close-ish contacts of people who come down with covid-19.
>When two users of this new app, called TraceTogether, are within two metres of each other their phones get in touch via Bluetooth. If the propinquity lasts for 30 minutes both phones record the encounter in an encrypted memory cache. When someone with the app is diagnosed with the virus, or identified as part of a cluster, the health ministry instructs them to empty their cache to the contact-tracers, who decrypt it and inform the other party. It is especially useful for contacts between people who do not know each other, such as fellow travellers on a bus, or theatre-goers.
>The app’s developers have tried to assuage concerns about privacy and security. Downloading it is not compulsory. Phone numbers are stored on a secure server, and are not revealed to other users. Geolocation data are not collected (though Google’s rules governing apps that use Bluetooth mean that they will be stored on Android phones running the app). They are planning to publish the app’s source code and make it free to reuse, so that others may capitalise on their work.
>Singaporeans trust their government. Since TraceTogether was released on March 20th it has been downloaded by 735,000 people, or 13% of the population, according to government data. Several Singaporeans your correspondent spoke to one overcast day in the business district were unaware that they could be prosecuted for refusing to hand over their data to the health ministry. But they had no intention of frustrating the authorities. “I’d rather be responsible than irresponsible,” said one trader.