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Today I published my first article for @themarkup(!): the privacy pros and cons of Apple and Google’s plans for COVID-19 contact-tracing apps.
TL;DR - it’s good at protecting anonymity but vulnerable to spoofing, trolls and other abuses. /1
TL;DR - it’s good at protecting anonymity but vulnerable to spoofing, trolls and other abuses. /1
Pros: it’s opt-in, it’s anonymous, it’s mostly decentralized and personal information isn’t required for use.
Cons: It’s vulnerable to trolls, spoofing, adtech, false alerts. It& #39;s unclear how apps will be vetted. And it relies on testing which is currently inadequate. /2
Cons: It’s vulnerable to trolls, spoofing, adtech, false alerts. It& #39;s unclear how apps will be vetted. And it relies on testing which is currently inadequate. /2
Security expert @rossjanderson perfectly sums up the way that the service can be abused by people who want to sow panic by claiming a COVID diagnosis /3
Security expert @samykamkar explains how user’s temporary identifiers can be spoofed – which is perhaps an advantage in making the data less attractive to law enforcement. /4
Security expert @moxie explains how there is already a commercial sector, adtech, that is using these same types of signals for “proximity marketing” and may try to listen in to the COVID signals as well. /5
But probably the biggest concern is false alerts. It& #39;s not clear how the algorithm will determine how much exposure warrants an alert. And it& #39;s also not clear what users are supposed to do when they are deluged with warnings about potential exposure. /6
In the end, I have to wonder if all the programmers who plan to work on this wouldn& #39;t be doing more for society if they volunteered to rebuild our broken online unemployment benefit portals. /end https://themarkup.org/coronavirus/2020/03/31/online-unemployment-benefits-systems-are-buckling-under-a-wave-of-applications">https://themarkup.org/coronavir...
And ... I forgot to link the story! 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🤦♀️" title="Woman facepalming" aria-label="Emoji: Woman facepalming"> https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2020/04/14/will-googles-and-apples-covid-tracking-plan-protect-privacy">https://themarkup.org/ask-the-m...
