5G and Beyond for Contact Tracing

Absolutely true that keeping surveillance measures private is key to their successful deployment. Then several years later you can mock the critics by pointing out it's nothing new and they shouldn't be so dramatic.

rtz121• 5 years ago

Yet again, the difference between conspiracy theory and reality is 6-12 months.

mrtksn• 5 years ago

At this point we can assume that anything technologically feasible for surveillance is implemented or pending implementation. There were some suggestions that the push for 5G comes from the desire to improve location tracking which is much better on 5G.

kook_throwaway2• 5 years ago

This has been the conclusion I've been dragged kicking and screaming to over the last couple of years myself.

- If it's not FOSS it's spyware

- If it's got a camera it's probably going to a datacenter to run facial recognition and/or ALPR or similar

- If it requires a login they are modeling your behavior

imwillofficial• 5 years ago

Nailed it

swiley6• 5 years ago

I posted ~8 months ago (albeit on an anonymous forum) that those really stupid 5g conspiracy theories might be a coverup for the privacy implications of 5g (my meta conspiracy theory if you will.)

jazzyjackson• 5 years ago

Create a conspiracy so out-landish it out-competes the legitimate concerns for attention and burns out people’s patience for listening. There must be multiple PR firms that have this strategy down pat, is there a name for it yet?

I might nominate Conspiracy-washing, or maybe conspiracy-flooding, drowning out the rational voices.

BobJackienine• 5 years ago

I think I'll just leave my phone home from now on. Call me leave a message and I'll get back to you after work.

NDizzle• 5 years ago

On a long enough time frame, Alex Jones is always right.

shapefrog2• 5 years ago

That he is a 'performance artist playing a character'

jsrjenkins• 5 years ago

It isn't even really a theory anymore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIgi7KPl6tw

IshKebab• 5 years ago

Uhm the 5G conspiracy theory is that it causes Covid. Not that the higher frequencies and smaller cell sizes allow better phone localisation, which is obvious and not a conspiracy theory.

rubyist5eva• 5 years ago

More mass surveillance. Wonderful

dirtyid• 5 years ago

There's a practical need for technological solution which can mitigate pandemics at scale. We went from historic cordon sanitaires that lasted multiple years to ~12 months for mrna vaccines. Effective contact tracing that enables societies to "live" with the virus while vaccine rollout is logical next step. Of course the chance of system being exploited in societies with the political appetite to actually enforce such a system is high. But IMO it's better for the capability exist somewhere than nowhere, especially when risk for pandemics will only increase with population + development over time.

choward• 5 years ago

You have to be kidding. This strategy of lockdown, wear a mask, contact trace and wait for vaccines clearly isn't working. Are you suggesting that it would work if the government could track our locations better?

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

It seems like places that actually did “lockdown, wear a mask, and contact trace” did better. (No place in the US did lock downs as far as I know. Several places in China did. When you’re welding steel together to enforce it, it’s probably a lock down. When you’re politely asking people to try to only go to stores once per day, it’s not a lockdown.)

CorrectHorseBat• 5 years ago

Not saying we should follow their lead, but China managed to do exactly that with stricter lockdowns, masks and contact tracing without regard for privacy.

After the initial wave China was covid free, people could travel freely and the economy was booming.

perihelions2• 5 years ago

Librem/Pinephone's killer feature is going to be the baseband modem kill-switch. It's going to be the only way to opt out of this category of tracking.

swiley6• 5 years ago

IMO: The real killer feature is the stuff Pine64 is doing with lorawan plus the phone's expansion bus.

andrey_utkin• 5 years ago

I imagine people caring about that could be shopping specifically for (any) pre-5G phones and networks. Might have an effect of holding up the deprecation of 4G as the first mover network will be economically punished.

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

Might have an effect

I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that really care about this and won't just get the latest iphone/Android they can afford once their old phone's screen is too cracked and the battery too aged.

3princip• 5 years ago

It's more practical at this point to start weaning off carrying a phone at all times. Not necessarily going off grid into the woods, just not carrying it unless you'll need it for something specific that day. I'm not sure more tech is going to solve this issue, we're just digging the hole deeper.

chasd003• 5 years ago

would the easiest thing just be a foil lined "wallet" for your phone? No signal getting in or out of a faraday cage.

blurbleblurble3• 5 years ago

The special thing about mm wave antenna arrays is that you don't need to have a phone on you to be identified by the unique fingerprint of your gait. There's enough information density in that spectrum to resolve your identity accurately even if you're not carrying a phone. And there are papers demonstrating how to do just that.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis...

thombles• 5 years ago

We argue that privacy enhancement technologies, albeit highly advisable, might not be strictly necessary, in front of the recent push of operators to enforce privacy via organizational measures.

The cynic in me says this is true - not because this is anywhere near sufficient to allay the concerns of privacy advocates, but because it will allay the concerns of legislators and most people who are subject to it won't know the difference.

swiley6• 5 years ago

T-Mobile has been doing a fantastic job. No need to think through privacy issues or use open and trust-less technologies, just let the administrators handle it.

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Are satellite phones an option for privacy?

petre• 5 years ago

I think those can be used to track you even easier. Always remember that Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed with a laser guided missile fired from a Su-25 while he was using a sat phone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev

I think the only safe option is E2E encrypted VoIP to a mobile phone used as a relay.

vlan0• 5 years ago

To get the most accurate data, pervasive mmWave would be needed. Which isn't about to be a reality anytime soon.

mmWave deployment proposals have hit my desk from the big US carriers. All in include fiber/microwave backhaul throughout the campus. And that wouldn't even provide full coverage. Pervasive mmWave coverage starts to looks similar in size to 802.11 deployments. Between that and 5G sharing unlicensed spectrum with WiFi6E, it was a hard pass for us.

NonContro• 5 years ago

If you examine ancient (ie. 'pre-COVID') CDC documents for recommended responses to influenza Categories, based on the global CFR of 0.66 COVID is classed a 'category 3' influenza variant.

Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...

It was voluntary isolation of the sick, 'consider' shutting down of schools but only for 4 weeks or less, and to 'consider' social distancing - based only on the age profile of virus deaths.

We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response.

You'll also note that in this document, there is zero mention of contact tracing. Its basically impossible and fruitless for a respiratory virus. Attempting contact tracing is really just about pushing acceptance of general location tracking onto the population.

eloisius• 5 years ago

Impossible and fruitless? Contact tracing has been quite effective in Taiwan unless I’ve been completely fooled by propaganda. And contact tracing apps don’t require you to accept general location tracking. They anonymously exchange temporary tokens and, when you report yourself as a positive case, the tokens you’ve used in the past two weeks get uploaded to a central authority so that anyone who has received them can see that they represent contact with an infected person.

tyfon• 5 years ago

Testing, (manual) contact tracing and isolation is imho the biggest preventive measures that have been taken here in Norway. They do struggle in big outbreaks though to map everything but all in all it seems to have worked.

Now we are at at 1/10th of the deaths of our neighbour by population.

monksy• 5 years ago

Let's not forget about S Korea, they've even labeled some of the bigger outbreaks and identified where and how they've happened.

IAmEveryone• 5 years ago

The document is from 2007. It doesn’t talk about contact tracing because phones were still using rotary dials at the time. It does mention, for example, quarantines for family members and work colleagues, which is just contact tracing by another name.

Contact tracing, as currently implemented in iOS and Android, does not reveal location data to third parties. There are many widespread uses of location data that are far worse for privacy.

For contact tracing to be useful, you need to:

- believe in the germ theory of disease

- believe in the ability to trace contacts at any level than pure randomness

These requirements are so low, it makes contact tracing at least theoretically useful at a level close to a tautology.

I find your document quite interesting in that it seems to recommend a lot of measures that we are using now.

TchoBeer3• 5 years ago

Go to page 9 and see what was mandated for that: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mit...

Interesting how COVID has killed more people than the "projected" (though how confident these projections are, who knows) number. And of course, that's with us taking stricter precautions than some of the suggestions.

thaufeki• 5 years ago

Assuming cause of death data is accurate of course.

spookthesunset3• 5 years ago

Assuming those precautions actually work… which there is scant evidence of.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

We've ignored everything previously established for pandemic response.

Looks like we actually forgot a lot also from much older events.

The following is from over 100 years ago.

https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/spanish-flu-...

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/16/multimedia/03even...

peytn• 5 years ago

We did not forget. We did experiments with gauze face masks. Here’s one from 1920:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362677/

I’m not aware of any recommendations to wear gauze face masks.

eplanit• 5 years ago

I can't trust the authors when they start with a false premise: "The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly raised the need for technological solutions capable to trace contacts of people and provide location-based analytics".

No, it has not created any such "need". "It's for yours and _everyone's_ health" is the most common premise used to reduce privacy and increase control over people.

No!

newbamboo3• 5 years ago

Yes. There is a demonstrable lack of need. Contact tracing has not worked and will not work for covid. As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true. The best measures against covid appear to be old fashioned common sense practices. Pay attention to yourself and if you’re sick stay home. Don’t cough, sneeze or breath on each other unnecessarily. Stand a bit further apart. Be outdoors more.

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

Even if it worked, it would be trading too much.

We already accepted destroying conviviality, limiting freedom of movement and taking a vaccine that has been fast tracked. At this point, I think I've done my part in concessions, especially in regards to following the directives of people and groups that have shown not to be trusted multiple times in the past and have been spreading so many contradictory messages in the last 2 years.

So no, officially accepting global tracking, in addition to the secret and scandalous one, is a no-go.

rstuart4133• 5 years ago

Contact tracing has not worked and will not work for covid.

As an Australian, I can say with certainty contract trace does work for COVID. It is one of the tools Australia uses to keep it's cases near 0.

There are caveats of course. Contract tracing's big brother is the lock down, where everybody is forced to isolate. It's the big brother because all contact tracing does is limit the lock down to those who have been exposed. They are found by tracing the contacts of existing infections.

Contact tracing achilles heel it is labour intensive. It works beautifully, right up until the number of new infections overwhelm the labour force available to do the contact tracing. So in Australia contact trace is always paired with an initial lock down, to give the contact tracers a head start. Delta in particular with its R0 of 7 can easily overwhelm the man power before within a week if you don't stop it dead. (This has now happened in our most libertarian state, forcing said libertarian state into the longest and invasive lock downs we've seen in Australia.)

In Australia contact tracing was done with no technological help whatsoever at the start. It was all via interviews. Now we have QR codes everywhere, which you are by law required to scan when directed to do so by the Chief Medical Officer, which is invariable while there is local transmission. This is done as a force multiplier of course - it both raises the number of infections needed to overwhelm the system, and speeds up shutting down the outbreak. Time is money, and in this case the money is measured literally in billions.

The sad and bizarre outcome is those QR codes are very invasive - we had a much better solution available. If you visit places that must have QR codes (which broadly is any business), you by law must take a smart phone with the contact tracing app installed. You have to enter all your details into the contact tracing app. When you scan the QR code it uploads the exact time and place to government servers. The uploaded information has already been leaked beyond it's intended use.

In contrast the original bluetooth tracing app (and probably this 5G solution) was designed to never leak your position unless you become a close contact of a person contacted by the contact tracers. They were far more private and resistant to abuse. Yet Apple and Google effectively made them impossible to use, due to erstwhile "privacy considerations". And in doing so, forced the adoption of solutions where, as far as I can tell, privacy was never a design consideration.

fomine3• 5 years ago

As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true.

I thought opposite. Contact tracing should work well for strongly spreading (without much contacting) variant because it just trace nearby user rather than "contact".

MrBuddyCasino• 5 years ago

"It's for yours and _everyone's_ health" is the most common premise used to reduce privacy and increase control over people.

I feel this one is rather new. People are by now trained to recognize the "we need surveillance due to kiddy porn" pattern. Many people are still unaware that the assumptions underlying most of the covid counter-measures are flawed and not supported by the data.

throwawayboise• 5 years ago

Whether the assumptions are flawed or not, the infrastructure necessary to track all the COVID cases and contacts is the same one that could be used to track all the Jews (substitute any minority group here).

blurbleblurble3• 5 years ago

There have been dozens papers like this for years spelling out exactly just what 5G is good for.

It should be understood that there are papers about how to do both device free localization and identification with mm wave antenna arrays. Some of these papers explicitly mention that their methods are compatible with off the shelf 5G hardware.

From a marketing and business perspective, what do you think "edge computing" is all about? What do you think "internet of things" is really about? "Smart cities"? These slogans are all but bold faced exclamations of what was intended by technologies like this.

Where I live, last summer during the protests, the first place 5G towers was in the areas the protests were happening, in the midst of the protests. Why? Why did protestors in Hong Kong decide to cut them down? Why are the five eyes countries so concerned about the security risks of Huawei 5G hardware?

theonlybutlet• 5 years ago

A solution in search of a problem? Ah cool lets call for social credits or something just cause it gets to use cool tech...

ABoredBirb2• 5 years ago

Longtime HN lurker here, finally something I can chime in on, as I was involved with the development of the Covid19 tracing app for my country.

limited deployment – any technology requires a sufficiently high number of users;

Sure, yes, that's true for anything.

security and privacy concerns – many weaknesses and privacy leakages are documented

I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API.

lack of reliability – BLE-based apps are prone to errors due to the usage of signal-strength measure- ments to infer contacts;

We did extensive testing and the only issues we found was that BLE couldn't tell distance very accurately, but still, we could, with high enough confidence, tell that two phones were within 5m of each other or so. There was also the issue of BLE signal going through walls, which meant you might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case.

data governance – there exists a double standard in governing users’ location data, with fine-grained tracking of device location available only to private companies such as Google or Apple

Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data, only proximity data and even that is only stored on the users device and never transmitted elsewhere. GApple covid19 tracing api is based on the DP-3T tracing protocol, the (very human readable) whitepaper of which can be read here: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%...

There was a lot of disinformation regarding contact tracing apps, both from tin-foil hat wearers, incompetent (or maybe corrupt?) state officials as well as competing, centralized (and actually privacy-breaching) solutions. I can still see a lot of this going around.

hansel_der2• 5 years ago

I am yet to hear of any such cases, when it comes to tracing apps based on the google/apple tracing API.

data leaks in the api itself will come to light, rest assured. but as you said, the problems with everyting besides the vendor-api have already caused a lot of privacy havoc.

ou might get a false positive with a neighbor, by placing your phone next to a wall, but that's really an edge case.

in a literal sense; yes :D but let me assure you that ppl putting their phone near a wall is absolutely not uncommon.

Plain false. Apps based on the API do not have users location data

again you seem to willfully misconstrue the allegation. let me tell you that just because the tracing app itself does not have precise location data, the problem of creating yet another record on your phone, attesting your behaviour, is not going away.

i take it you are not (yet?) critical of privacy implications of your $dayjob, but try to respect the concerns of ppl that are unilaterly affected by them.

ABoredBirb2• 5 years ago

You ought to read the whitepaper I linked. I absolutely take privacy seriously in both my job and my private life. What is kept on your phone in the DT3P/Gapple scenario is neither location data nor even a list of "contacts". What it does keep is a list of temporary (15 minutes or less) ids for the last two weeks - this does not reveal how many people youve been in contact with, much less who. It is as privacy respecting as it gets.

5G and Beyond for Contact Tracing

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