This is terrible. Let me tell you why. THREAD #privacy #infosec #cybersecurity #COVID19 theverge.com/2020/4/10/2121…
First, health data has ALWAYS been considered protected and sensitive. Hence, the privacy requirements and oaths physicians abide by - courts have LONG recognized this privacy.
Here, we're going to have health data records tied to a person tied to a phone tied to a location. It's literally a real-time walking health report.
Think if this had happened during the AIDS epidemic. I guarantee you people would have been murdered by homophobes.
This will ABSOLUTELY be used to discriminate against people as fear of coronavirus will rise as we leave large-scale quarantine. Some people will not be allowed in certain places. Some people may not be allowed to return to work.
How will the software be able to tell if the person is actively contagious, infectious, or not?! Just because you were sick with coronavirus at some point doesn't mean you are actively contagious. But, how do we tell? The answer is, of course, an antibody serum test.
I don't like the slippery slope argument - it's a logical fallacy. But, this is a pandora's box going to be used to discriminate and harm others.
The described tech and approach says that it only works phone-to-phone and with data you "self-identify" as infections. Let me explain why that isn't an effective method.
First, if you've self-identified as infectious WHY THE HELL ARE YOU GOING INTO PUBLIC PLACES AROUND OTHER PHONES? Will this give people a false sense of "i'm infectious but doing the right thing?"
Second, phone data has NEVER been proven secure and the chance of release is above 0%. In fact, this is so juicy I'd argue there will be lots of baddie who are interested in finding ways to leak this.
Third, to do "post-contact" infection alerts that means your phone needs to store all of the other phones nearby it has seen for X period of time. Then, when you self-identify that will have to be sent to a central service (which then knows which phone is "infected")
This means, your "infection" warning is now tied to your phone and sent to a central service who then notifies all the other phones of the "infected phone" who then searches their local cache for the identifier of that phone...
What if my daughter borrows my phone? But I'm the one infected?
I'm *NOT* arguing that there are good, useful, and positive uses of this technology. But, unless you can guarantee, everywhere in the world this will be deployed will only use it for good, then we must consider the bad use-cases as well.
Bluetooth-to-bluetooth is NOT just a "local" issue which somehow alleviates all privacy and location concerns. qz.com/1169760/phone-…
Crypt spec pg 6 - your privacy is literally contained in a "must not" spec. "The server must not retain metadata from clients uploading Diagnosis Keys after including them into the aggregated list of Diagnosis Keys per day." covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/c…
