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At this point my best advice is to disregard literally everything you read about contact tracing apps because the discourse is motherfucking carnage. If you thought the government and media had fucked up technology before, they have dig deeper than deep.
I'm going to go off a bit but I'm going to do it as an ELI5 because all the folks I chat with on Twitter who are also nerds already get this at a different level, but here we go *puts square of black cloth on head*
Your phone is a computer. You knew this, every piece of news you've consumed for ages periodically talks about your phone being a computer. It's a flat, rectangular computer and very much like a laptop.
In 2020, there's roughly two sorts of computers. There have been for a while but bare with me, there's computers that do stuff when you want - we just call these computers - and there's computers that do something all the time for anyone who wants them to - we call these servers
So the phone in your pocket, and your MacBook, and the Lenovo thing your work gives you, are just what we call computers. Then the ones that make websites go, we call servers. Servers make e.g. Twitter go. When you want to use Twitter, servers make it be there.
Your smart phone is really good at being a computer. It's much better than very expensive computers only a few years ago, but it is fucking SHIT at doing something all the time. It's not good at being a server. It doesn't provide services well. Mostly because of battery.
When your phone is locked in your pocket it does very little at all. It periodically checks if you have new mail or tweets or instagram stories or whatever and displays notifications. It is fucking awful at pervasively making a thing go. It is designed to not do this well.
There has never really before been a reason for your phone to be permanently available to do a thing if asked by something else on the Internet. Your phone does not serve websites, it does not run a mail server. It has never done these things Customer, not shopkeeper.
Your mobile phone data plan is designed to periodically download small to medium pieces of information off another computer. Its battery is designed to support this over the course of a day. It is not "always on" because it is a personal device, not a public service.
The basic underpinning theory behind contact tracing via an app, expects your phone to be a service that is permanently recording nearby services, and transmitting information to be recorded by those services, when this is PuRe FuCkInG FaNtAsy
The idea of figuring out where shit is via bluetooth (this is the magic that makes your headphones work without a cord, as I said on ABC national Drive yesterday), isn't new. There's apps that allow you to add a tag to your keys and find them.
But those VERY periodically record where your keys were last in range, and are very clear that their reason for existing is your keys are probably where you were earlier today. They do NOT realtime track your shit, because you'd be able to hear your battery draining if they tried
Apple and Google working together is interesting, because to make contact tracing via a phone a useful tool for actual fucking doctors (not Silicon Valley dudebros), you probably need to carefully break specific parts of the way your phone works.
Your phone is designed to shut up when it doesn't need to send or receive information. Contact tracing works on lots of chatter. You need to fix (?) that at the base level to get anywhere.
We've had about 13 years of deliberately trying to not make our phone announce its presence and keep a record of presence of other devices. Every "do you want to give [app] access to [function]" popup was asking for exemptions to this rule.
Now we need to;
a) override that and make phones talk to others secretly by default, and reveal that information to... idk? Government? Which? State health? Fed? Local hospital? Wtaf knows?
b) Get folks to set aside roughly same 13 years of government catastrofuck in app launches
a) override that and make phones talk to others secretly by default, and reveal that information to... idk? Government? Which? State health? Fed? Local hospital? Wtaf knows?
b) Get folks to set aside roughly same 13 years of government catastrofuck in app launches
