Do you think this is ok???

ggdm

Tue, Aug 18 2020, 12:33 pm

First: Do not skip updates, they make your phone safer.

Second: If you have GPS activated ("location" on iPhone, don't know for Android) and allow an App access to it, that App can know where you are. Helpful e.g. for navigation or "find the closest supermarket/ATM/bus stop/...". Not so cool for non-trustworthy apps. You can (and absolutely should!) deny access to GPS for all apps you don't trust.

Third: The API. It does not use GPS. It cannot know health data (how would that work??). Without an app authorized to use theAPI, nothing is done. I don't know if there is an app that can use it in the US. So relax. Absolutely nothing has changed. If you trusted Apple/Google before to not track you, you can still trust them. (Tracking you they could have done all this time without you knowing and without adding suspicious entries in your settings - but they don't, because if it were to become public, it would ruin them).

Fourth (for the technical minded): What the API does. It uses Bluetooth to exchange anonymous tokens with other phones that are in close proximity. The tokens change every 15 min or so and cannot be linked to a phone or person. They are saved only locally on the phone and only one app (per country, I think) can access them. With the help of this API, a country can develop an app to help Covid contact tracing. Basically, if a person tested positive, she can upload her anonymous tokens somewhere. The app compares every day the list of locally saved tokens (= people who have been close to you for a longer period of time in the last 14 days) to the list of tokens on the server (= infected persons). If a match is found, the app can warn you that you have been close to an infected person sometime in the past 14 days and you can then decide to get tested (if you want, nobody but you will know that you got that notification). A few apps using this API have been developed or are being developed now. If anyone wants more technical details, feel free to ask Wink

ggdm

Tue, Aug 18 2020, 12:46 pm

amother [ Apricot ] wrote:

They have been using this technology since the start of corona here in israel. the misrad habriut have been calling people round the clock to tell them to go into bidud. kosher phone or not. app or no app. A lot of people just started leaving their phone at home.

What Israel has been doing is far more serious and questionable than that API Googke and Apple implemented. Israel basically used its secret service terrorist tracking on the whole population. Which goes against a few basic rights, I think.

Don't kid yourself. If the government wants to track you, they can. But usually, in a free democracy, there are legal barriers to prevent this type of thing from happening. Read about the NSA and Snowden if you want to know what the US does in that respect.

But there is a hierarchy here of who wants to track you and what you can do:
1. Government - hard to impossible: give up - unless you are a terrorist, this shouldn't be relevant
2. Google/Apple - hard: don't use a smart phone - this is a question of trust, I personally trust them
3. Random app - simple: restrict permissions for that app, don't install suspicious apps, don't enter personal data if you don't see why - very relevant

If you worry about tracking, first thing don't use Facebook, Instagram, etc.