Thursday, June 16, 2022

privacy delusions during covid

 there was a massively misguided movement to provide privacy for exposure notification during the 1st yr of the covid 19 pandemic. in reality, the notification delivery network (e.g. in Germany run by Telekom) new the imea/phone that the message was delivered to, so it was a total delusion, irrespective  the GAEN API guff. - and the privacy of who might have been exposed was hidden from public health (epidemiologists) who actually needed to know (and said so many times) to be able to figure out the infectiousness, susceptibility and superspreader incident rates by ages/location type etc, but were reduced to poor inferences based in very small samples.

so the people who could work things out were the least trustworthy (telco/tech) whereas the people who actually were trustworthy (health practitioners) could not. 


meanwhile, vaccine certificates were not only issued en mass, but could be looked at by arbitrary authorities who the subject had no idea about their trustworthiness. given vaccination status tells you very little  about either infectiousness or susceptibility, but exposure to a person who has actually  tested positive recently tells you a lot.


totally the wrong way around. What this tells you is far more about the relative power of various groups (privacy wonks, apple, google, telcos, border control, public health researchers) than actually about priorities for  health and personal safety.


makes me very cross.


No comments:

Blog Archive

About Me

My photo
misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home