[liberationtech] Google to release your location data to help fight coronavirus pandemic

[Greg Maxwell]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 4:48 AM Cecilia Tanaka <cecilia.tanaka at gmail.com> wrote:
> Google to release your location data to help fight coronavirus pandemic.
> <https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/tech/coronavirus-google-data-sharing-intl-scli/index.html>
> <https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-mobility-reports>
> <https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility>
>
> How about privacy?!?!

It's a bit paranoid, but back when sars-cov-2 spread started to get
detected in the US back in February, my household started leaving our
phones powered off at all times. -- For us, that isn't a big cost,
because we hardly use them (especially when at home)-- and I was
concerned that eventually companies like Google would start handing
over data.  I didn't want the risk that some infected person passes by
our home on a bicycle [1] with an ultimate result of placing us on
some "potentially infected" list and thrown into some virus-exposed
internment camp to get infected and die in-- which is an uncharitable
though I think not absurdly uncharitable interpretation of what was
reported from some places in China.

I figure that one of the few ways to avoid becoming roadkill for some
byzantine AI (automated idiocy) decision system is to simply minimize
how often your information is being presented to one.

While I didn't consider this risk to be particularly large, it was one
I could reduce at a fairly low cost.  And in a time of pandemic where
so much is outside of our control having another thing I could do,
however small, provided some solace.

When the US interred Japanese-Americans during WWII into prison camps
they violated the confidentially of the census in order to do so. The
location data collected by communications providers and advertising
companies like google would be much more easily compromised because it
has little to no statutory protection and potentially much more
damaging.  The only protection against "well meaning" tyranny is
setting things up in advance to be resistant to it through actions
such as not building and participating in massive location
surveillance infrastructure in the first place.

Ultimately instead of aggressively chasing early infections
authorities in the US seemed to significantly under-respond, which is
its own brand of bad.  But things could change and the nature of a
privacy loss is that you can never undo it even if later the new
situation turns an old harmless leak into something concerning.  So
while my move still appears to have been unnecessarily aggressive, we
don't know what the future might hold.

Of course, the phones had to be *off* because location privacy
settings are widely ignored/bypassed/buggy.  When I worked at Mozilla
and Mozilla was still working on Firefox OS there were incidents with
engineers that were hired from the cell phone ecosystem that had
multiple cycles of code review rejections because their
location-privacy-settings-didn't-actually-private because that was
just the customary practice in their industry to do things like make a
location privacy setting still phone home with your location but with
an additional "private" flag set. Mozilla cared enough to review for
and catch these things. But most companies would go the opposite
direction. And even if I was using FFOS I'd have relatively little
confidence that it actually achieved privacy-- it's too hard in a
world where so much of our infrastructural is designed to achieve the
opposite of that.

In a better world, we'd have a framework for the legal protection of
our privacy and we'd have infrastructure that respected it by default.
But we don't live in that world.  We have to protect ourselves and
sometimes the best way to do it is through rather blunt measures.
It's worth giving some careful thought about the tail-risks brought by
modern technology such as IOT and mobile phones and how much marginal
value they really provide in your life.


[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761