Data collected to promote public health must never be surrendered to police
- Reference: 1625124364
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/01/scan_the_honeypot/
- Source link:
In Shanghai every billboard, poster, and newspaper advertisement bore QR codes, all linking off to their respective web sites. It felt simultaneously old-fashioned (QR codes had been around for years, but never taken off anywhere else) and startlingly new — a QR code makes an excellent partner to a smartphone’s camera. I returned home to Australia and a life without QR codes, where we relied on humans typing away at tiny glass keyboards to enter data.
COVID-19 changed all of that.
[1]
Well into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, here in Australia we’ve become used to scanning a QR code almost every time we enter a local café, grocery store, or university classroom. Point the app at the QR code, and you’re in.
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Or, rather, point the right app. Each of Australia’s states has its own check-in app and, as restrictions lifted and I began to travel, my smartphone grew a bit congested with all of them.
Each app demanded a fair bit of personal data (name, address, phone number) in the service of public health. If I had been exposed to someone infectious with COVID-19, public health officials would soon know how to find me and notify me that I must isolate, to reduce the potential for further spread of infection.
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It all seems like a very good idea, and appears to work far better than the invisible-and-always-active Bluetooth proximity detection touted by Apple and Google during the pandemic’s earliest days. ( [5]The Australian Government tried a variation not based on the Apple/Google technology.) Although theoretically ideal, especially from a privacy perspective, that technology never really did the job — resulting in only a very few detections in Australia. We’ve fallen back to a human-centred approach, requiring people to check in as they move through the world — creating a breadcrumb trail that contact tracers can access, should they have the need.
[6]The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to build a semiconductor foundry is 5 years ago
[7]Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish
[8]Harassers and bullies succeed in tech because silence is encouraged
[9]A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it
That we track ourselves willingly shows us just how far our feelings about privacy have been transformed by the pandemic. Something that not long ago would have been considered government overreach and an intrusion into our lives — inspiring [10]a fair bit of public debate last year — has become normalised and accepted as part of the price of safety in uncertain times. Yet within that agreement between ourselves and the state lay another bargain — unspoken, but acknowledged — that the data collected could only be used to protect public health.
Meanwhile, the treasure trove of individual tracking data (matched only by all the [11]data hoovered up by every Android device everywhere in the world) grew and grew and grew until it became an absolutely irresistible honeypot. Not for hackers, as you might expect — but for police.
In the last month we’ve seen legislators in Western Australia suddenly find the need to [12]pass laws to restrict police access to QR code data — because WA Police did access the data in order to help them solve a murder. A week later, we learned that police in another Australian State, Victoria, had tried to access QR code data three times in December 2020. In that case, [13]the police were refused access by state government departments . But at present no laws protect Victorians against such an abuse of their freely offered tracking data — just in case.
In Singapore, the government [14]reminded citizens that while it had said data from its contact-tracing apps would only be used for health purposes, other laws overrode that statement.
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Singaporean culture permitted that reversal. But in other nations, if people know that their data can be used against them they will not freely offer it up.
Only where that data comes with the absolute assurance of safety will people feel secure enough to provide it. Yes, the police have their own priorities around public safety, but in any contest between policing power and public health, the police must never — under any circumstances — get a look in. It would not take much of an abuse to cause the public to lose faith in the current regime of QR code check-in apps completely. Once that trust collapses, the job for contact tracers becomes infinitely more difficult, while the threat to public health grows exponentially.
We need to draw the line. Every government, everywhere, that offers a check-in app must agree — in law — that our freely provided data can only be used for public health. No exceptions. Without that legislation in place, abuses will occur, leading the public to grow increasingly uncomfortable — and non-compliant. That could quickly land us in a very dark place: the very opposite of the safety and security for which we all have worked so hard. ®
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/16/covidsafe_update_ios_issues_persist/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/09/let_the_chips_fail_where_they_may/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/blessed_are_the_cryptographers/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/20/harassers_and_bullies_succeed_in/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/code_war/
[10] https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/privacy-in-the-time-of-covid19
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/10/google_android_12_beta_2/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/15/western_australia_contact_tracing_law/
[13] https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/police-sought-access-to-qr-check-in-data-intended-for-contact-tracing-20210621-p582x4.html
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/singapore_covid_tracing/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YN2SQ2Urq4Nks@76DHvZZwAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous
Suprisingly, nobody else did, until now, that is, with Australia opening the way again.
To be fair, most other places are using apps based on the Apple/Google Exposure Notification API, which can't be abused in this manner. The UK uses QR codes but those are helping to connect anonymous identifiers on the Exposure platform.
There was of course the controversy over [1]UK Police accessing Serco's separate Test & Trace data , notionally to enforce self-isolation rather than in pursuit of broader Policing aims but still chilling and liable to make the data less useful for public health usage, which is entirely unacceptable.
[1] https://www.digitalhealth.net/2020/10/police-to-get-access-to-self-isolation-data-from-nhs-test-and-trace/
Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous
Suprisingly, nobody else did, until now, that is, with Australia opening the way again.
Early on, police in Germany collected the lists of visitors to search for witnesses to various petty crimes in the vicinity. I'll never enter my real data again.
Maybe I don't have to. I got my vaccination shots. That means I'm good, right?
Relative exposure
" ... the treasure trove of individual tracking data (matched only by all the data hoovered up by every Android device everywhere in the world) ... "
I would probably amend that to "grossly exceeded by".
Nevertheless the scale of the hoovering is not what mainly worries folks - it's the potential for repurposing by governments (and that's specifically what data protection legislation was invented to control). However, since the behemoth hoovers are now so pally with governments anyway, Covid-related data collection is quite probably just a drop in the ocean.
Privacy assurance cannot be trusted
"Every government, everywhere, that offers a check-in app must agree — in law — that our freely provided data can only be used for public health."
No such assurance can ever be trusted, as the government can always change the law later on.
Re: Privacy assurance cannot be trusted
No such assurance can ever be trusted, as the government can always change the law later on.
It's just digital bells. No vaccination? No pubs, clubs, concerts or travel for you. But now this has become a pandemic, what we're seeing is simple gain-of-function research. The population has been conditioned into giving their location information. Especially now exciting new variants have become available. See for example-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57610998
The 43% figure relates to deaths only - so it misses all the vaccinated people who were exposed to Covid but did not catch it, or caught the virus but did not become very ill.
Test them, count them as cases anyway. Case=Case+1, publish headline with daily case count.
And by now, almost everyone at risk of dying from Covid has been vaccinated (more than 90%).
Or they might have died in the 'first wave'. Or second. Regardless, the new normal fixated on cases being positive test results, not severity of illness.
And in a world where every single person had been vaccinated, 100% of Covid deaths would be of vaccinated people.
Ermm.. quite. But then you'd need to just adjust your messaging to try and explain why people who've been vaccinated are stil dying of Covid. Or mebbe just tighten up the coding of deaths so vaccinated people don't appear to be dying of the thing they've been vaccinated against. The CDC has done this, along with tightening up on PCR cycle counts and the definition of 'case'.
And there is another reason you cannot currently just compare the number of Covid deaths among vaccinated and unvaccinated people and come to any conclusions about how effective the jabs are.
Because most fully vaccinated people are over the age of 50 - and therefore more likely to die - while most unvaccinated people are young and healthy.
Well, quite. Or as the recently departed Donald Rumsfeld once said, it's about known unknowns. Like it's unknown how many people developed Covid antibodies, triggering overly sensitive Covid counters without actually getting more than mild symptoms. The herd immunity thing where once everyone's been exposed, tests become less meaningful. But a known known is that young & healthy people are much less likely to get seriously ill from Covid. But let's vaccinate them anyway because we've got millions of doses, and they've got expiry dates.
Of course then it's back to vaccinated people dying, and running the risk of being miscounted. Death by tombstoning on a hot day is likely in <50's than >50's, but might still get counted as a 'case'. Can't be having that.
But such is politics. Herd immunity also becomes herd conditioning, helped along by Minitruth and the media. Which conditions people to just accept that it's for your own good, or a public good, and why won't you think of the children?
Not think about more awkward stuff, like how vaccine passports would work in pratice. Or why they couldn't be added to the chips in biometric passports we now have to have. Or...
Every government, everywhere, that offers a check-in app must agree
.. that a simple flaw exists. Like people not bothering, or forgetting to check-in. Or possibly worse-case, if services are withdrawn for the unclean, checking in with false ID. Thank you for checking in Ms Mallon, may I call you Mary?
In Shanghai every billboard, poster, and newspaper advertisement bore QR codes
One could expect people in Shanghai to have QR code mandatory tattooed in a near future, just to fix the inconsistencies of [1]Facial Recognition
We now have quite all a tracking device in our pocket all day long, monitoring where we go, who we meet. The best is that we even pay to have one, and pay again to have a better tracking device every couple of years! These devices record now our digital fingerprints, the picture of our faces. Soon they will analyze our DNA. Is there any sci-fi author who viewed that coming?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42973456
try turning off GPS, bluetooth, WiFi. Not complete, but its a simple start and your battery life will improve immensely
" its a simple start ..."
Or maybe finding out you can actually survive without a data slurping smart phone. We managed quite well for centuries before they were invented.
It's like the disastrous consequences of the CIA using fake vaccination workers to locate Bin Laden. Now real vaccination workers are targeted by the Taliban and the fight to eradicate polio may never recover.
you mean
trust the vacuum cleaners who want our entire medical history handed over to a select few, consisting of anyone who asked ?
All in name of "Science" of course. The same mob who hand over any phone record to any casual copper snooping ? For our own protection, not some abusive spouse hunting down an escaped wife and children. Oh no, never. Ponses the lot and no, there is a significant lack of trust in authority to not abuse covid records. The only characters who trust authorities I have run across are the old "Karens" who love to scream self righteous abuse and enjoy a good moral panic. Apologies to Karen refugees who now have another source of confusion added.
observation
the group that passes for leadership in this country (Oz) all seem to believe the hoi polloi will accept any inanity if it is justified by the magic word safety. Regrettably, I think they are mostly right. Unfortunately, so many of the distrustful are informed by FaecesBook rather than reason and history
Re: observation
It's not unique to Oz, its pretty much the same everywhere else, although some countries seem to prefer the mantra is "think of the children" instead of "safety".
As I always say...
With all of these things, the best approach is to say to the politicians "you first".
Let's start tracking the politicians' movements and making them public. Then we'll see how quickly this would go away.
Likewise encryption (publish all politicians' whatsapp messages), plus any number of other things you can think of - even declaring war. IMO if any politician votes to go to war, they should be issued a rifle and sent to the front line, in harm's way. I suspect this might make quite a change in attitudes...
Singapore's decision was disastrous
At the time, I remember very well the number of comments wondering whether or not these COVID tracking apps would be perverted like that, and then Singapore went and did exactly that.
Suprisingly, nobody else did, until now, that is, with Australia opening the way again.
There is clearly a problem in our so-called Western society. On the one hand, everyone is all about Freedom (and, increasingly, Privacy), on the other hand we are sliding slowly but surely into police states at a level Orwell would be amazed of.
Democracy is hard enough to keep going as it is. Let's keep the jackboots at bay.