On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 4:48 AM Cecilia Tanaka <[email protected]> wrote: > Google to release your location data to help fight coronavirus pandemic. > <https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/tech/coronavirus-google-data-sharing-intl-scli/index.html> > <https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-mobility-reports> > <https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility> > > How about privacy?!?!
It's a bit paranoid, but back when sars-cov-2 spread started to get detected in the US back in February, my household started leaving our phones powered off at all times. -- For us, that isn't a big cost, because we hardly use them (especially when at home)-- and I was concerned that eventually companies like Google would start handing over data. I didn't want the risk that some infected person passes by our home on a bicycle [1] with an ultimate result of placing us on some "potentially infected" list and thrown into some virus-exposed internment camp to get infected and die in-- which is an uncharitable though I think not absurdly uncharitable interpretation of what was reported from some places in China. I figure that one of the few ways to avoid becoming roadkill for some byzantine AI (automated idiocy) decision system is to simply minimize how often your information is being presented to one. While I didn't consider this risk to be particularly large, it was one I could reduce at a fairly low cost. And in a time of pandemic where so much is outside of our control having another thing I could do, however small, provided some solace. When the US interred Japanese-Americans during WWII into prison camps they violated the confidentially of the census in order to do so. The location data collected by communications providers and advertising companies like google would be much more easily compromised because it has little to no statutory protection and potentially much more damaging. The only protection against "well meaning" tyranny is setting things up in advance to be resistant to it through actions such as not building and participating in massive location surveillance infrastructure in the first place. Ultimately instead of aggressively chasing early infections authorities in the US seemed to significantly under-respond, which is its own brand of bad. But things could change and the nature of a privacy loss is that you can never undo it even if later the new situation turns an old harmless leak into something concerning. So while my move still appears to have been unnecessarily aggressive, we don't know what the future might hold. Of course, the phones had to be *off* because location privacy settings are widely ignored/bypassed/buggy. When I worked at Mozilla and Mozilla was still working on Firefox OS there were incidents with engineers that were hired from the cell phone ecosystem that had multiple cycles of code review rejections because their location-privacy-settings-didn't-actually-private because that was just the customary practice in their industry to do things like make a location privacy setting still phone home with your location but with an additional "private" flag set. Mozilla cared enough to review for and catch these things. But most companies would go the opposite direction. And even if I was using FFOS I'd have relatively little confidence that it actually achieved privacy-- it's too hard in a world where so much of our infrastructural is designed to achieve the opposite of that. In a better world, we'd have a framework for the legal protection of our privacy and we'd have infrastructure that respected it by default. But we don't live in that world. We have to protect ourselves and sometimes the best way to do it is through rather blunt measures. It's worth giving some careful thought about the tail-risks brought by modern technology such as IOT and mobile phones and how much marginal value they really provide in your life. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761 -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to digest mode, or change password by emailing [email protected].
