Other apps can peek at you(r data)

from here and here (source article)

Don't look now, but a company that has been violating your privacy for decades has failed to keep their special one-time promise to protect your privacy with respect to COVID-19 (and didn't even take it seriously until reporters got involved).

We kinda should have seen this coming. It's not like they have a lot of experience protecting your privacy.

Thanks to Vesselin Bontchev for basically coming up with the idea for this meme.

The unintended costs of mass surveillance

from here

So Singapore is letting police access contact tracing data and people are concerned, and perhaps rightfully so. Over and over again, governments have proven they can't be trusted not to use the data they collect for purposes other than the data was intended. The United States exemplifies this and as a result they are unlikely to ever be able to do meaningful contact tracing because people don't trust that the data won't be used for other purposes - and that lack of trust is costing lives. There are other factors also costing lives, but even without those factors, contact tracing would still be a problem and without contact tracing it's impossible to get ahead of an outbreak.

That's not what contact tracing means

from here

Violating privacy is a weird way to look for love in a pandemic. That's not what the information was meant to be used for, and doing that sort of thing is going to create a disincentive to cooperate with something that is very important for public health right now.

The fox is offering to guard the hen house

from here

I never thought I'd see the day when people fought back against tech companies' data grabbing ways in significant numbers. It's just a shame that they picked this time to do it. I'm not saying that they should trust big tech companies, but there are going to be serious (possibly life and death) consequences from choosing now as the moment.

Now they just have to scare people into installing it like normal AV

from here

It's certainly good to hear that Google and Apple are working together on contact tracing, even if there are some problems with their approach.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

from here

I really hope NSO group does not get any contracts to do contact tracing. I don't want to see their human-rights-abuse-facilitating tools get broader adoption than they already have. I realize contact tracing can help, but there's got to be a better way than using those particular tools. Maybe something like what's described in this comic.

On an unrelated note, today I learned that that saying in the title about hammer is actually know as Maslow's Hammer or the Law of the Instrument. Yes, the same Maslow that gave us the hierarchy of needs.