Thread by @fs0c131y

1/ I noticed that a lot of people don't know what #tracing and #tracking means.

#tracking is associated to something bad, but for some reasons #tracing seems ok. Let's go back to the definitions

2/ According to Wikipedia: "A tracking system is used for the observing of persons or objects on the move and supplying a timely ordered sequence of location data for further processing." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_…

3/ Even without technical skills, people understand that a system is observing, monitoring, their movements. Because we are adults with our free will, it's something we don't like.

#tracking = bad

4/ According to Wikipédia: "In software engineering, #tracing involves a specialized use of logging to record information about a program's execution" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_(…

5/ This is clearly more complicated to understand than the #tracking definition.

In order to debug a program, a software engineer will *log* more information than usual about the program execution. The info collected is highly dependent of the problem he wants to solve.

6/ Let's put that into our context. #Covid19 triggered one of the biggest crisis of the world. Software engineers like to solve problems, so they tried to find something. They want to *debug* the situation. To do that they invented the contact #tracing apps

7/ The program to debug here is a human disease. The information they want to collect to debug it is your contact history.

8/ To summarize:
- #tracking = collection of information about your movements
- contact #tracing = collection of information about your contacts

In both case, it is personal information gathering about you.

9/ So yeah

#tracking = bad

but also

contact #tracing = bad

10/ Don't be fooled by vocabulary, #tracing or #tracking neither is good for your #privacy