California Partners With Apple and Google For COVID-19 Contact Tracing On Phones 61
California is partnering with Apple and Google on an app to let people use their phones to track potential exposure to COVID-19. CNET reports: The digital system uses Bluetooth signals from people's phones to alert them if they've been in contact with someone who's tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The project takes advantage of two of the world's most popular operating systems -- Apple's iOS and Google's Android -- to potentially reach billions of people. To use the features, people can download the app, called CA Notify, starting Thursday. On iPhones, people can turn on the alerts in their phone settings. The companies said they intend to shut down the tools after they are no longer needed to fight the pandemic.
"after they are no longer needed" (Score:5, Informative)
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Contact tracing is illegal under the California State Constitution, the United States Constitution and is in violation of Federal HIPPA laws.
Do shut up, or the men in white suits will be sent.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
It's *unconstitutional* for you to know that you spent time near somebody who generated the random number 946026592642?
What part of the Constitution is that, somewhere in article 3?
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Nope, only you know the numbers that you randomly choose each day.
If you're curious, I posted how it works below.
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Ps, the Constitution creates the federal government, saying what the *federal government* can do.
It lists 13 things the federal government can do, says they can't do other things, and lists some things specifically that the *federal government* is specifically not allowed to do.
The Constitution has absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about whether or not I tell you that I just randomly chose a number, did some math with that random number, and got the result 36105715194620402.
The Constitution is on
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Somewhere that number is traceable to a person, so it is effectively a person.
Nonsense. All the information about the Apple / Google tracing API has been available for the world to see since March and April, and the whole point is that it isn't traceable to a person whatsoever. It can tell you that you were too close to person who has been infected, and that is.
There's one problem with it: The guys at Apple and Google who developed it are highly intelligent, and they didn't expect the absolute stupidity of moronic idiots who are so afraid of non-existing dangers that they stop thi
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Section 420, I think.
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Re:"after they are no longer needed" (Score:4, Informative)
Contact tracing is illegal under the California State Constitution, the United States Constitution and is in violation of Federal HIPPA laws.
It's difficult to take advice on HIPAA from someone who can't spell HIPAA.
HIPAA applies to a very specific set of entities. Typically medical providers, insurers, and employers who pay for all or part of an employee's medical insurance. HIPAA is not a magic law that makes all personal medical information from any source super secret. If an individual discloses their information to some entity which is not subject to HIPAA, then that information is free to be shared. The information may be subject to other privacy laws or restrictions, but not HIPAA.
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Ha ha! Nice one. We know this is going on forever.
Silly liberal! After the Government sends jack booted thugs to hold you down, and then forcibly injects the Microchip under the faked "Coronavirus vaccine" fraud, they will be able to track you personally 24/7. No need for a half-assed contact tracing app. WAKE UP AMERICA!
This at last is the plot of Hillary, Oblama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk fulfilled, ushering in the thousand years of Liberal terror - but fear not, for you and I will be raptured, as scripture foretells in Trump 3 verse 25
Far as I know nobody's cleaned up the wet markets (Score:5, Interesting)
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Lol. My Costco (and probably yours too) is a wet market.
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Tell them to repair the damn roof.
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Lol. My Costco (and probably yours too) is a wet market.
Your Costco sells live, wild-caught animals, and stores them in cages on top of the cages of other live, wild-caught animals, where they can shit on one another? Send pix, that sounds wild AF. I want to see what the Karens make of that shit.
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You appear to have a very interesting definition of "wet market." Not surprising, I guess.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
And the Oxford English Dictionary:
Costco absolutely sells fresh meat, fish, produce a
That is no longer the colloquial definition of it (Score:2)
So no, Costco is not a wet market, any more than your local supermarket butcher is. You might have been sort of right in the 1950s.
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You disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary about a definition based on the strength of... assertion.
Love it.
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That's funny.
rsilvergun is physically incapable of ever saying "oh, that's interesting" or anything else that might suggest that his first guess wasn't spot on. Which is sad, because that trait prevents him from ever learning anything.
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That is one of the saddest afflictions of the human race, unfortunately something we're all prone to. It's dangerous too. Anyone who thinks potentially disease promoting animal husbandry practices are a Chinese problem has never driven behind a semi loaded with chickens or pigs pretty much anywhere in North America.
Re: That is no longer the colloquial definition of (Score:2)
Goalposts moved. So pathetic. Overcrowding is only one problem at wet markets. Storing disparate species in crowded conditions is an entirely different thing from overcrowding pigs.
Your Costco has live animals? (Score:2)
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and not just in China. There's wet markets all over the place (Eastern Europe, Africa, India, etc). So yeah, we'll be dancing this Charleston again before long.
Starting to wonder who really needs a wet market when all you may need, is a bad mutation.
Fifteen days (Score:2)
Ha ha! Nice one. We know this is going on forever.
Fifteen days to flatten the curve. We know it will be painful, but it's only 15 days and if we don't shutdown everything the hospitals will be overloaded and there will be many needless deaths.
We have to shutdown, Fifteen days to flatten the curve...
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If you're lucky. In Slovenia we closed schools for two weeks. That was seven weeks ago, schools are still closed, as is more and more other stuff, and no end in sight.
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But can they get people to answer their phones? (Score:2)
I personally don't answer calls to my cell phone unless I recognize the caller. I wouldn't answer a call from a contact tracer, mainly because I don't trust caller ID. Nor do I trust voicemail messages from unknown callers. I'm sure I'm not alone, and this limits the effectiveness of contact tracing.
Re:But can they get people to answer their phones? (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't read the story, did ya? Here, let me help you:
The digital system uses Bluetooth signals from people's phones to alert them if they've been in contact with someone who's tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
. . .
To use the features, people can download the app, called CA Notify, starting Thursday. On iPhones, people can turn on the alerts in their phone settings
No phone calls involved.
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Your answer would make sense if contact tracing were intended to inform YOU that you were in contact with someone who got sick. That's not how it works. When someone gets sick, they use contact tracing to find people you were in contact with, to see if they might have gotten it from you, and who you got it from, theoretically to the original source. That process isn't automatic, because your phone can't tell if you are sick. For contact tracing to work, they have to TALK to people.
A very quick summary of how it works (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a quick explanation of how it works.
(Copy-pasted from my post here a couple months ago).
Every day my phone picks a random number.
Every ten minutes it produces a hash of that random number along with the current time. It sends that hash to anyone who stays near me for many seconds. Note you can't reverse that hash to get my secret random daily number. (But if I TELL you my number you'd be able to check to see if you got a hash of my random daily number). Your phone saves the hashes from people you've been around for many seconds. This number is meaningless at that point, indistinguishable from random digits.
If I test positive, I tell the health department server my random daily numbers for the last two weeks. That's all they get - numbers I picked at random. "Random" is important because every mathematically provable security definition includes the phrase "can't distinguish from random". Because my numbers ARE random, they are indistinguishable from random in every possible scenario, so this part has maximum security.
Each day your phone fetches from the health department server a list of the random numbers sent in as infected. Since you're not infected, you don't send anything to the health department, you just get a list of random numbers from them, each random number having been generated by someone who has the virus.
Now here is the magic. Your phone takes the list of numbers that came from infected people and runs the same hash algorithm that my phone ran. Which means it produces the same hash that I produced. If you were within 6-12 feet of me, your phone would have saved my 10-minute hash, so your phone checks the "infected" hashes against your list of "received from people near me hashes". If there is a match, you know that you were within about 10 feet of someone who later tested positive. Therefore you should probably get tested. You don't know WHO it was, just that you were near someone who was infected.
Again, the server knows NOTHING about who was near who, not even which random numbers were near which other random numbers. It knows only that "this random number was randomly picked by someone who tested positive".
It's a pretty clever scheme, providing probably the maximum amount of privacy theoretically possible while allowing you to determine if you've been around someone who has the virus. Nobody else can determine even that much.
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This is interesting, but contact tracing isn't, and never was, about informing YOU the phone owner, that you've been in contact with someone who had the virus. The goal of contact tracing is to find the theoretical source of someone's infection. So YOU are just a stepping stone to the real answer.
First, contact tracers start with a person who tested positive. From there, they look for people they were in contact with. Among those, they try to determine which ones were also sick. In this fashion, they contin
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What you describe is one process called "contact tracing".
What I describe is what the app does. The creators of the app call it a "contact tracing" app. If you want to argue that's a poor name, that's fine with me.
I think the problem with the name is that people see "contact tracing" app and for whatever reason think "location tracking". Which is misleading - it doesn't record locations. Maybe tracing looks and sounds too much like tracking. People don't like tracking, so maybe they shouldn't have used th
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Technical question.
Any idea where to look in the phones filesystem to determine how many contacts have been recorded over a given period? For us curious nerds.
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On Android, application data is stored in /Android/data
There is a directory in there for each app. You'll see the naming convention.
I haven't looked at the source recently, but the file is likely to be a Berkeley DB file - that's popular on Android.
For each contact the file will have a timestamp, which may be an integer modulo 600 seconds, and a SHA1 hash, which may be stored in either binary or hex.
Integer divided by, not modulo (Score:2)
I said "modulo 600 seconds" when I meant "the result of integer division by 600 seconds". So take the current timestamp (Linux epoch time), divide by 600, and drop everything after the decimal point.
This part is an educated guess based on how *I* would implement the spec for the app.
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Does the report, "you may be infected," go straight to the user, or does it also go to "public health authorities" (along with your phone number, IMEI, google account email, or ad cookie, since most of these things can be extracted with no special or deniable permissions on Android)? This alone would violate the privacy HIPAA intended and that many people avoiding the app want, which was (for better or worse, considering the current public mood) for people's diagnosed diseases not to be used to discriminat
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> Does the report, "you may be infected," go straight to the user, or does it also go to "public health authorities"
It's 100% internal to the app, the list of numbers you received doesn't go anywhere.
> For example, a restaurant won't let you enter unless you open your app and let them see it. Has California made this illegal
I suppose a restaurant could ask you for a negative test result today - no need for an app if someone is dumb enough to turn away customers while pissing off all the customers.
Just
Re: A very quick summary of how it works (Score:2)
Two: my phone has been close to the phone of someone who tested positive, who has had the app running with BT and GPS on, like my phone, and who entered the government issued code into the app. Now, two days later, my phone still tells me all is peachy. Yes, I'm in quarantine. But disappointed that I got to give Google all best spots, in exchange
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What's voicemail?
I turn that shit off the second I get a new SIM.
This is kind of usless if it's not national (Score:2)
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I know you're not from the US, but, FYI, the Federal Govt doesn't have the power to force this upon US citizens.
It is purely voluntary, you can't be coerced by the Federal govt for sure, and likely as not by the state government either.
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I know you're not from the US, but, FYI, the Federal Govt doesn't have the power to force this upon US citizens.
Yes, in a time of public health emergency, the US President can declare an emergency and take related action, such as requiring the FCC require cell carriers to load contact tracing apps on the phone. See A Guide to Emergency Powers and Their Use [brennancenter.org].
This is how South Korea controlled their Covid-19 outbreak. Our President did not have enough guts to do what should have been done in April, 2020, and
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This isn't S. Korea, we're supposed to be more free than th
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Frankly, I think I like a lot of folks, if they tried to pull something like that...would just refuse to carry my cell phone.
Well, I'm certainly not carrying your cellphone. It might have Covid on it.
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If you test positive, you submit a random number you chose.
Actually a random number for each of the last few days.
Then people know that someone who tested positive chose the number 93629620263923. Which is absolutely useless random bits - unless two days before you received a SHA-256 hash of (the current time mod 600 seconds concatenated with 93629620263923). If that number and a time modulo 10 minutes matches a hash you got yesterday, then you should get tested because you were hanging around someone who
Too Late to Contact Trace (Score:2)
How well will that work? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are 18 million smartphones in Australia. 4 million can't run the applications because they are no longer supported yet have the hardware to do the job. About 3 million phones don't have the proper hardware. The average age of phones in Australia is newer than California so many phones just won't work?
NOW? (Score:3)
I find it really hard to grasp that a (one?) state in the US NOW starts to use a system for exposure tracking that has been in use in many countries of Europe for half a year.
e.g. Germany is using it and we’re really careful if it comes to data safety. It’s useful, but hardly the one measure that safes us all while we are fscking up in other askects.
Does it work with dogs and minks? (Score:2)
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In the US, some states' hospitals are overflowing again right now, because people are pretending this thing is over already. Their make-believe time is killing people.
Contact tracing isn't about informing YOU (Score:2)
The goal of contact tracing is not, and never was, about telling YOU that you were in contact with someone who has coronavirus. This would be about as useful as telling you whether you've handled money that has traces of drug residue. Guess what, if you have money in your wallet, it has traces of drug residue. If you've been outside your home, and likely even if you haven't, you've been in contact with someone who has coronavirus.
The goal of contact tracing is to find the "original" source of an infection.
Success depends on people's willingness to opt in (Score:2)
The people who are most worried about coronavirus, and presumably the most motivated to use this app, are the same people who will be the most careful about where they go, social distancing, and mask wearing.
The people who are the least worried about coronavirus, and would definitely NOT install and use this app, are also the ones who will go anywhere, do anything, and flout rules related to social distancing and mask wearing. This presumably means these people will also be at higher risk of transmitting th
useless (Score:1)
In the pilot program, a very small number of hits occurred. Seriously, do they think that when you've gotten a diagnosis of covid, you are going to be wanting to deal with authorizing notices to be sent to others, or are you worrying about your own situation. This kind of thing can only work in places like China or maybe some Scandinavian country where everyone is super altruistic.
fsck Google (Score:2)
So, all these Covid19 apps may well be properly made (several are fully open source, I noticed the