https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/18/israel-passes-emergency-law-to-use-mobile-data-for-covid-19-contact-tracing/
Israel passes emergency law to use mobile data for COVID-19 contact tracing
Natasha Lomas@riptari / 3:25 am PDT • March 18, 2020
Israel has passed an emergency law to use mobile phone data for tracking people
infected with COVID-19 including to identify and quarantine others they have
come into contact with and may have infected.
The BBC reports that the emergency law was passed during an overnight sitting
of the cabinet, bypassing parliamentary approval.
Israel also said it will step up testing substantially as part of its respond
to the pandemic crisis.
In a statement posted to Facebook, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote: “We
will dramatically increase the ability to locate and quarantine those who have
been infected. Today, we started using digital technology to locate people who
have been in contact with those stricken by the Corona. We will inform these
people that they must go into quarantine for 14 days. These are expected to be
large – even very large – numbers and we will announce this in the coming days.
Going into quarantine will not be a recommendation but a requirement and we
will enforce it without compromise. This is a critical step in slowing the
spread of the epidemic.”
The Prime Minister of Israel
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following remarks this evening, at
the joint statements with Health M...
On Sunday, March 15, 2020, 11:46:22 PM PDT, jim bell <[email protected]>
wrote:
https://apnews.com/97dbcb6d4ef71a48d15a7ec5dd7b4c48
[partial quote follows]
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel has long been known for its use of technology to track
the movements of Palestinian militants. Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
wants to use similar technology to stop the movement of the coronavirus.
Netanyahu’s Cabinet on Sunday authorized the Shin Bet security agency to use
its phone-snooping tactics on coronavirus patients, an official confirmed,
despite concerns from civil-liberties advocates that the practice would raise
serious privacy issues. The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending an
official announcement.
Netanyahu announced his plan in a televised address late Saturday, telling the
nation that the drastic steps would protect the public’s health, though it
would also “entail a certain degree of violation of privacy.”
Israel has identified more than 200 cases of the coronavirus. Based on
interviews with these patients about their movements, health officials have put
out public advisories ordering tens of thousands of people who may have come
into contact with them into protective home quarantine.
The new plan would use mobile-phone tracking technology to give a far more
precise history of an infected person’s movements before they were diagnosed
and identify people who might have been exposed.
In his address, Netanyahu acknowledged the technology had never been used on
civilians. But he said the unprecedented health threat posed by the virus
justified its use. For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or
moderate symptoms. But for some, especially older adults and people with
existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness.
“They are not minor measures. They entail a certain degree of violation of the
privacy of those same people, who we will check to see whom they came into
contact with while sick and what preceded that. This is an effective tool for
locating the virus,” Netanyahu said.
The proposal sparked a heated debate over the use of sensitive security
technology, who would have access to the information and what exactly would be
done with it.
Nitzan Horowitz, leader of the liberal opposition party Meretz, said that
tracking citizens “using databases and sophisticated technological means are
liable to result in a severe violation of privacy and basic civil liberties.”
He said any use of the technology must be supervised, with “clear rules” for
the use of the information.
Netanyahu led a series of discussions Sunday with security and health officials
to discuss the matter. Responding to privacy concerns, he said late Sunday he
had ordered a number of changes in the plan, including reducing the scope of
data that would be gathered and limiting the number of people who could see the
information, to protect against misuse.
[end of partial quote]
On Friday, February 21, 2020, 04:45:16 PM PST, jim bell <[email protected]>
wrote:
I am surprised that when I do a Google search for 'COVID-19 "google timeline"
', I see essentially no results.
We all know now what COVID-19 (nCov, Coronavirus) is. From the reports I see,
this virus has the unusual characteristic of being very contageous for up to
periods of weeks prior to a person's feeling symptoms. That is presumably how
a large fraction of a cruise ship became infected. This is quite ominous. If
epidemiologists were to ask a patient, "tell us where and when you've been each
minute over the last 15 days" the vast majority of these victims wouldn't have
a prayer of providing that information. And even worse, finding the other
people who were "in that AM/PM at 5:07-5:21 10 days ago" would be essentially
impossible. Or potentially dozens of other involved locations, over those 15
days.
Before one of you accuses me of "advocating" the use of Google Timeline to
track potential cases of COVID-19 by means of Google Timeline, I don't need to
"advocate" it. Rather, I simply point out that there are a lot of people out
there scared of this virus, and probably be looking for a way to determine if
their paths have crossed with a victim, even if that victim wasn't symptomatic
for 1-2 weeks after the contact. So at some point, I think there will be
discussion of this possibility. The data is already being collected, in all
Android phones (is there an Apple equivalent?) In principle, if a new infectee
is identified, it would be technically possible to work backwards, figure out
where he has been over the relevant period, and find anybody who was close to
him during a multi-week period.
One reason this could be important is that there may be a drug which might
reduce (or, hopefully, eliminate) a person's contageousness if it taken during
this pre-symptomatic period. One possibility is an old anti-malarial drug,
chloroquine, which I have mentioned before.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32074550
But if people only begin taking chloroquine when they begin exhibiting
symptoms of this new flu, that means that they will be spreading that virus
for as much as two weeks, or even more. In principle, hundreds of people could
be infected, directly or indirectly, merely because there is no early warning.
Suppose you receive a text or email notification that you were in a small
store, 5 days ago, with a person who just developed symptoms of COVID-19. You
MIGHT be infected. So, you MIGHT want to take a chloroquine pill. (The
half-life of chloroquine is 45-55 days). Or some other pill that could assist
if taken long before symptoms were likely to appear. Not only might you not
get sick, maybe you'd be able to avoid transmitting the virus to many others.
(My speculation...) And maybe you'll live, when you otherwise wouldn't.
We Cypherpunks are SUPPOSED to be more concerned, than average, about the
privacy and freedom implications of technologies. What I have described,
above, might be handled in a completely-voluntary fashion. But, we want to
ensure that this doesn't turn into a permanent form of tracking. So we should
debate the implications of all this, ideally before everyone else is talking
about it.
I would be surprised if Google isn't already considering something like this.
They have much of the data to do so. They might hesitate to announce such an
idea, for fear that people would think this is some sort of generalized
people-tracking system.
Jim Bell
