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Next stop: Chinese-style full on police state. What do you have to hide? Are you guilty of crime-think?

Numbers speak for themselves
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No police state, more an understanding for the common good of all concerned. Sooner the better all concerned realise that COVID-19 is a serious issue and act accordingly. Sadly as one commentator stated "Rabbits in the headlights" is beyond me why government's did not react more expediently, as the outbreak in China was clearly documented to all...

Stay safe

Q-6
 
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I take it you don't know anyone who might be on immunosuppressants or elderly? Or anyone who knows anyone who is? Or anyone who works in the emergency services?

Follow your local advice or pressure them into legally enforcing it.

Just curious, was this a legitimate comment or and attempt at sarcasm?

I think he was serious. He’s made other posts suggesting that old people deserve to die for being old, need to thin the population, etc.
 
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I understand, my point is that "But did you die?" is not "fine" and these people are also hurting themselves.
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Yeah, the entire world has access to this but when our government leverages it - watch out, too much power!

Meanwhile, when they don't leverage it, "Government is so inefficient, private sector is more agile"

The "private" sector will sell your ass out in a hot minute, if it involves them losing some money.
 
The only difference between the US surveillance state and China’s (whom we’re all supposed to regard as an enemy) is China is upfront about it.

The US just has mechanisms and partnerships built into the private sector surveillance (adtech) to give a glimmer of plausible deniability.

There is one other important difference. China would actually use their spy power effectively to protect the Chinese people. That isn’t to say communists governments are good. They’re not. They’re awful. But when confronted with a foreign virus threat China would use its spy and other powers to stop their country from being as badly damaged as western countries have been. Our surveillance state is too busy cooking up homegrown terrorism plots they can bust rather than doing anything useful.
 
There is one other important difference. China would actually use their spy power effectively to protect the Chinese people. That isn’t to say communists governments are good. They’re not. They’re awful. But when confronted with a foreign virus threat China would use its spy and other powers to stop their country from being as badly damaged as western countries have been. Our surveillance state is too busy cooking up homegrown terrorism plots they can bust rather than doing anything useful.

Are you seriously insinuating that there are fake terrorism busts going on? Our surveillance right now is watching for right wing domestic terrorism and mass shootings, and they're actually catching people despite being hamstrung by our current administration. Yes, China would be unified in its purpose - our weakness is that our elected officials in the executive branch don't know how intelligence works.
 
There is one other important difference. China would actually use their spy power effectively to protect the Chinese people. That isn’t to say communists governments are good. They’re not. They’re awful. But when confronted with a foreign virus threat China would use its spy and other powers to stop their country from being as badly damaged as western countries have been. Our surveillance state is too busy cooking up homegrown terrorism plots they can bust rather than doing anything useful.
Then I'm sure you are against AG Barr trying to suspend habeas corpus, so the gov't can hold accused criminals in jail indefinitely during a state of emergency.
 


The U.S. government is using smartphone location data from the mobile ad industry to track people's movements amid the coronavirus outbreak, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

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Local governments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received the anonymized data about people in areas of "geographic interest," with the aim being to create a portal of geolocation information for 500 cities across the country.

The information will be used to learn how well people are complying with stay-at-home orders, according to WSJ. Citing an example, the report says researchers discovered large numbers of people were gathering in a New York City park, which led them to notify local authorities.

Even though the data is anonymized, WSJ says that privacy advocates want "strong legal safeguards" to limit how it can be used, in order to prevent its use for other purposes. Cellular carriers told the news outlet they have not been asked by the government to provide location data.

The development follows reports of other countries using cellphone data to monitor citizens and see if they are complying with curbs on movement to defeat the viral outbreak.

European mobile carriers have reportedly been sharing data with health authorities in Italy, Germany and Austria, while at the same time respecting Europe's privacy laws. Earlier this month, Israel passed emergency measures that allow security agencies to track the smartphone data of people with suspected COVID-19 and find others they may have come into contact with.

Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Article Link: U.S. Government Using Mobile Ad Location Data to Track Compliance With Curbs on Movement

How is it a "political" issue that Google and Facebook gave more info on you than the Stasi ever could? That sounds like plain old consumer issue.

Or maybe it's political because from what Snowden said almost a decade ago, the government already has this information and is using the ad companies as a fig leaf - and the public is very slow on the update?
 
The only reason this is being done, apart from the lack of privacy scandal, would be because the U.S can see how their loosing control of the virus.

In Australia you don't have this, and in WA, we have the lowest compared to NSW who did things wrong..
 
Oh, he doesn't need to know them. I was trying to appeal to his morals. Maybe he's more likely to care about people he knows than people he doesn't. If they literally can't see how it impacts them and their immediate circle maybe they make different judgement calls.

Hi @mixel - FWIW my initial reply was not intended as a pointed jab, more seizing the opportunity to highlight the insanity of our culture's selfishness. Doubling down on your outrage. We're on the same side of the argument :)
 
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I don’t really have a problem with anonymized location tracking in this situation. But I suspect its actual effectiveness at significantly slowing the rate of virus spread would be trivial.

Tracking tied to specific individual like done in China, S. Korea, and possibly Israel theoretically allows such things as 1) contact tracing, 2) quarantine compliance of existing and potentially infected (due to contacts and/or travel) individuals, 3) identification of regional “stay at home except for essential reasons” order violators.

But I do not believe that level of tracking would be possible to effectively implement in USA, and probably most countries in Europe, especially no. 3. For several reasons, mostly practical.
I’m against self-incrimination. You should not use my personal devices that I paid for and trust for intelligence purposes. You can use street camera or satellite imagery for that purpose. Not personal devices.
 
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I’m against self-incrimination. You should not use my personal devices that I paid for and trust for intelligence purposes. You can use street camera or satellite imagery for that purpose. Not personal devices.

It's for policing and control purposes, not "intelligence". And why is it even OK for anyone's personal device to be tracked for advertising purposes even, never mind the rest.
 
It's for policing and control purposes, not "intelligence". And why is it even OK for anyone's personal device to be tracked for advertising purposes even, never mind the rest.
It is intelligence, government domestic intelligence, that is "bulk collection" aka. mass-surveillance, policing and control are the resulting action of the intelligence.

You can read my other post below for my stand on advertising and IC in general.

Jokes on you, the IC intelligence community. I block all ad and analytics traffic on a network level. All my network traffics are over a secure VPN to HQ, which then routes exit traffic through a commercial VPN or Tor based on traffic and packet analysis at the gateway.

So, unless the server hosting the web content is also natively hosting first-party ads and analytics without using an advertising network API and without running an internal dedicated ad server or API proxy, nothing will reach me. Therefore, for ones that do reach me, I don’t mind because they are safe, and I believe this is the only legitimate way of advertising and analytics on the web.

There is a log of the ads that are blocked on the network. It is randomly delayed and passed to VMs with Tor-enabled Firefox, all ads are randomly clicked there silently, opened and interacted with silently for a random number of times between 0 and 5 million, and for a random duration between 0.002 to 20 seconds. Each interaction is a stateless RAM-only instance with a new Tor identity, and a randomized set of Firefox profiles.

If you click on every Malicious Ad, that’s going to break the banks of advertisers. A real click can cost $25 just for visiting the advertiser. It is also very boring for analytics octopuses. Having a preference for everything is the same as having no preferences at all.

Trying to act human-like will only generate bot-like patterns that you would never have expected or realized. This is just math. Therefore, you need to act “obviously like a bot” and “no way that’s a bot” randomly, like a bipolar.
 
I take it you don't know anyone who might be on immunosuppressants or elderly? Or anyone who knows anyone who is? Or anyone who works in the emergency services?

Follow your local advice or pressure them into legally enforcing it.

I just want to say I am imprressed with your eloquence
 
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