Re: COVID-19 contacts tracker (Re: a brief pondering)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/16/20 3:18 AM, Rob Sayre wrote:

> It's not clear that any of these tracker proposals actually harm 
> privacy. Certainly the government in most places can get this data 
> from phone companies and correlate it themselves.

I think that's almost true but not quite true.   The governments can get 
location data, but the location data is not that helpful at learning who 
was within virus exposure range of whom, or at learning who was actually 
within conversational range of whom (say, to spread ideas thought to be 
subversive by the leaders of a regime).    What's being talked about for 
contact tracing is using Bluetooth or other means to try to measure that 
kind of proximity.   So these would be new capabilities in addition to 
capabilities that already exist and those new capabilities might present 
new threats to people.

Keith