Apple is working on AirTags which are set to use Ultra-wideband technology. This, in theory, would be better than Bluetooth and could ultimately let you know if someone with COVID-19 lives near you or frequents the same areas that you do.
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Apple and Google Partner on Opt-In COVID-19 Contact Tracing Technology to Be Added to iPhone and Android Smartphones
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Apple is working on AirTags which are set to use Ultra-wideband technology. This, in theory, would be better than Bluetooth and could ultimately let you know if someone with COVID-19 lives near you or frequents the same areas that you do.
Your own carrier knows where you are and where you've been. Unless your a person of very high interest I doubt that the NSA is even concerned of your activities.
While I haven’t read Google’s draft documentation, it appears that Google plans to follow Apple’s approach quasi-exactly. No sense in reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Like I mentioned, with Find My, Apple’s basically already shipped this feature and they’re just going to re-apply it to this use case with some tweaks.
Basically a Bluetooth beacon it’s like Apple had for merchandise in store that could be looked at on your device. Maybe the U1 chip has this planned all along. Bluetooth tracking is cause for concern. Think of it this way you get up in the morning this system pings your device, 15 mins later it pings again where you are in your car or on-route to take public transportation, 15 mins later it has you on-route to some destination, then again at your location, etc. Basically it places a dot every 15 mins where you have been with greater accuracy. With this method I can tell exactly what your daily routine is, what you have been up to etc. Sure you can sugar coat it with anonymity but it not hard to figure this out, it’s a similar fashion to how detectives find patterns when narrowing suspects.
If The Government wants us to remain inside then they ca use this technology to send a electro-shock to you if you step outside more than 10 feet from your door
Oh, hell no.
Slippery slope, not down with this.
Slippery slope, not down with this.
In order to develop immunity to a pathogen, your body first has to be infected, and survive the resulting disease.
If this were to happen with COVID-19, the death toll in the U.S. alone would be in the millions, because the health care system would quickly be overwhelmed due to the exponential growth of diseases.
This is trivially proven by just looking at, say, Italy, where exactly that happened, and hospitals had to triage patients.
The point of the shutdown that's happening in essentially every country around the world is to prevent precisely this overload from occurring.
I really am surprised that there are still people out there who don't understand this. Maybe it's because exponential growth is such a hard to grasp concept for humans.
Will it be able to track you if you are in airport mode, if so then I suspect the U1 chip is being used. Other than that care to elaborate with information you may have, thank you.
Agreed. For everyone who doesn't mind government tracking because they "have nothing to hide", PLEASE go read the introduction to the book "IBM and the Holocaust" (you can read it free on Amazon.com). I am NOT saying the U.S. is Germany or anyone is Hitler. I am just saying data collected for one purpose is FREQUENTLY used for other purposes.
Just one relevant example... for 64 years the U.S. Census Bureau denied that they shared data (voluntarily collected from Japanese Americans) to help round up innocent Americans and forcibly relocate them to internment camps during WWII. However, it was conclusively proven in 2007 that the Census Bureau had indeed shared that data. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/
I made a post earlier that details exactly how this feature works based on the draft technical documentation published by Apple as part of their announcement today.
Nothing is tracked by a central authority. Your phone remembers all the IDs other phones have transmitted to it. A central server can tell you which of these IDs were submitted by a person recently tested positive for the virus. Then you know you've been close to an infected person, but without knowing who that person is.
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You don't understand the underlying technology. Read some of the non-FUD-y posts in this thread that explain it.
If nothing is tracked or validated by an authority, what prevents a bunch of kids from clicking they have COVID, flagging everybody and making the system useless, or worse, blocking legitimately at-risk people from getting tests?
Conversely, what prevents somebody from not entering their data to avoid embarrassment? If a number of people simply claim to authorities that they only have an old phone or dumbphone?
In order for the system to work effectively, authorities will have to force everybody to use it correctly. Otherwise, it's just PR for tech companies.
Stop spreading this nonsense. No personal data is shared in the proposed contact tracing solution. It is significantly stronger, privacy wise, than the alternative of in-person interviews for contact tracing, because that personally identifies people, which the app does not.
All your phone knows is that an ID it has seen via Bluetooth at some point in the past reported itself as infected. All your phone does in the event you report yourself as infected is share the random IDs it has used over the last few days, without their date/time, or location, or any other personal information.
In the coming months, Google and Apple will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-baed contact tracing platform by building this functionality into their underlying platforms.
What puzzles me here is “In the coming months” bit. According to the current forecasts, most of the world should be off the Covid-19 infection peaks by then. So what is the point of putting all this Apple-Google effort in? Are they expecting Covid-19 to become a permanent thing, like a super-flu, hitting the world on a regular basis from now on?
What puzzles me here is “In the coming months” bit. According to the current forecasts, most of the world should be off the Covid-19 infection peaks by then. So what is the point of putting all this Apple-Google effort in? Are they expecting Covid-19 to become a permanent thing, like a super-flu, hitting the world on a regular basis from now on?
Just curious...who do you think that someone is? Would it be the same someone in the government knowing the minute-by-minute movements of every other person in the US with a phone (more than 200 million people)?
OK based on the illustration somebody posted it makes more sense now. Still I think a lot of people will be skeptical that this won’t lead to government tracking of people. Fauci recently said immunity cards is something worth looking into. We should be skeptical.
(Luckily) I don't live in the USA. I find amusing that in 2020 there are still people who believe they have not been constantly tracked for at least the last 10 years. And 98% of them have Facebook, Instagram installed on their phones.
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The current idea is that each country's CDC equivalent runs the necessary server, and to submit a set of IDs, you need a one-time password, which your doctor can generate for you.
All the CDC gets is your random IDs, without information about you, your location, or anything else.
And even if the evil deep-state CDC asked your ISP to tell them who pays for the 4G or home WiFi that belongs to the IP address who submitted a few random IDs, all they'd learn is that John Doe reported himself as infected with the help of a doctor who is, presumably, already required to submit information about the infection to the CDC.
I'll be permanent. Too late to isolate it. We'll have to use this "Smart quarantine" until THE vaccine is developed (which seems tricky as the immunity (antibodies) doesn't last long after having COVID – this probably means that regular re-vaccination might be necessary)
Can't help but laugh at the majority of the posts in this thread. It goes to show how many folks react strictly to the headline of an article, in which they never actually read to fully understand what the finer details entail. As some have noted, it's fully opt-in, and even when opting-in, your "device ID" stays anonymous unless you proactively go into the app (if you downloaded it) and take specific actions. Given the government can already read your SMS/emails, tracker your location, listen to your phone calls, track your travel itineraries, follow you in public, do you really think allowing them to use this additional data to stop deaths and from you losing your job is that criminal? I understand freedom is important, but now more than ever, it comes at a price.
Everyone wants COVID-19 to go away, so we can resume a normal lifestyle and start up the economy again, but no one wants to consider sacrificing an infinitesimal amount of privacy (which, as noted above, they already have access to more information than most seem to understand) for the greater good. The US can either adopt a bunch of sweeping measures that may involve trying things that haven't been attempted before, in order to best contain the virus so life can pick up again. Or we can continue ignoring the proven methods of leveraging science and technology by countries that have been far more successful in containing the virus, and this virus will continue to drag out over the remainder of 2020 while further ruining our economy. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Everyone wants COVID-19 to go away, so we can resume a normal lifestyle and start up the economy again, but no one wants to consider sacrificing an infinitesimal amount of privacy (which, as noted above, they already have access to more information than most seem to understand) for the greater good. The US can either adopt a bunch of sweeping measures that may involve trying things that haven't been attempted before, in order to best contain the virus so life can pick up again. Or we can continue ignoring the proven methods of leveraging science and technology by countries that have been far more successful in containing the virus, and this virus will continue to drag out over the remainder of 2020 while further ruining our economy. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Another case: there are protests in Iran. Security services seed the protest with a few phones on agents. They report those phones infected, then arrest everybody who shows up for a test.