i wrote about contact tracing apps this week. their value, if any, is to optimise a large testing regime. more interesting is the massive sensor network Apple and Google can whip up just by agreeing on a protocol. it exposes their power. 3.5bn phones suddenly proximity tracking

your phone feels like yours, and in many ways it is. but apple and google control it over long timescales, can and do shift the ecosystem to their advantage. i know this is obvious, but the covid bluetooth protocol highlights it for me

it is *deeply* weird to me that two American companies control a piece of global infrastructure as important as smartphones. the bluetooth collab makes me wonder, all of a sudden, whether the global public is getting value out of that infrastructure

as networked sensors & compute get cheaper, are installed in more places, for more mundane uses, i worry more & more about who controls them. smartphones are the vanguard of this wave of sensors.

i don’t worry about privacy. the A/G protocol shows you can do massive tracking and sensing in a privacy preserving way. i worry about controlling human behaviour with digital systems. that’s ultimately what the A/G system is for. what behaviour control systems are coming next?

here’s the contact tracing piece https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/04/15/app-based-contact-tracing-may-help-end-coronavirus-lockdowns