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Comment by felooboolooomba

4 hours ago

Not to mention that your android/ios device is still shipping a bunch of bluetooth tokens for "track and trace" system. Cryptographically signed to you.

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

> Cryptographically signed to you.

That's a bit of an oversimplification that makes this sound more concerning than it is. Not that it's 100% un-concerning, but I suggest that anyone concerned about this read the linked docs. It really was designed to be quite privacy preserving, though it's obviously a difficult challenge in this context.

  • Isn’t this GPS data to see where Covid has spread? Even if your name is anonymous, a GPS point that every day goes to your work and then your home is surely you?

    • Most probably, yes. But how would you know who I am and where I live? And if you do know both of those things, are there other ways of figuring out my routines? Yes, there are.

      Keeping the name out of that data does a lot for privacy. With a name in there, you could use the data to find my name and figure out my address. Without the name in there, you don't know which point I even am without knowing some of my locations from another source.

      1 reply →

It is encrypted ciphertext rotated every 10m in lockstep with your Bluetooth identifier.

You will need to turn off your Bluetooth if you want to stop advertising a rotating random number.

The only difference with the contact tracing is that a key, on the device, can correlate the ciphertext. I have it off because the utility was never demonstrated.