Month: May 2020

There’ve been a lot of articles recently, about Google and Apple collaborating on a Coronavirus tracking application

At first glance, you think, “good,” that will make it easier for health officials to figure out how to stay ahead of outbreaks.

It would, but at a price to your privacy.

We have only Apple and Google’s assurances that the information won’t be misused. Implicit in this software solution is the belief that when the Coronavirus emergency is over that the tracking information, indeed the application itself will be of no further use. The assumption is that the application can be deleted and tracking will by default, be turned off. How do we know that & how can we verify that this is true?

I could see an application such as Google and Apple are working on, morphing into a general “Health” application wherein a wide variety of diseases are tracked. As I understand the Coronavirus aspect if you test positive for Coronavirus and enter your diagnosis into the application, then your movements are plotted. Local health officials can then watch the spread of Coronavirus throughout a community presumably because other people will also be entering their diagnosis too.

This raises some questions for me. If one person whose positive, visits an area and other people get sick is that person liable? Could they be prosecuted or sued? Should they be? I’m sure that due to the fear promulgated by media, politicians, and rumor. The initial response would be YES!!!

But let’s step back a bit. Would the answer be the same if the application was tracking hepatitis, syphilis, gonorrhea, Influenza, herpes, HIV, measles, or chicken-pox? These diseases present health departments with challenges to tracking and treatment. In fact these diseases are more of a health hazard than Coronavirus may prove to be.

Even if you think this is a good idea, what happens as the application evolves? Do you really want your phone telling the health department or law enforcement that you not only have the clap, but that you visited a particular massage parlor? How about your phone automatically warning others around you that you’re a pariah, because you’ve got the flu or that one of your kids has chicken-pox?

In an extreme scenario; do you want to have to verify and report to authorities that you’re going to have sex with an individual?

The application could in fact give that kind of power to an authoritarian regime. Phone A was in close proximity to Phone B for 43 minutes in a hotel that rents by the hour on this date. This was an unauthorized sexual event, warrants have been issued for the participants arrest.

Oh we say that could never happen. Yet, we have evidence of widespread surveillance by departments within our own government, of average people.

We’ve seen maps of cell phone data showing that people en-mass can be tracked going about their daily business. There is evidence to suggest that specific individuals can be isolated from the mass of data without too much effort or specialized tools.

During this pandemic, we’ve seen cell phone maps used by the New York Times to paint some areas of the country as “Non compliant in the lockdown” because the cell phones were traveling more than X miles from their point of origin.

The fact that the area of the country the New York Times called out, was a rural area and the nearest grocery stores were 15 to 20 miles away was conveniently omitted from that article when it first appeared. The Times, isn’t a government entity, nor are they involved in public health, but it demonstrates just how easily data can be misused.

This got me wondering… Just how much information is my phone, my smart watch, my computer, my ipad, even my car sending and to whom? The next question is, “If I turn these systems off, how much do I degrade the operation of my devices?

I was shocked when I pulled up the privacy setting in my phone.

Almost every application is requesting access to location data.

Some of these applications make sense, Maps, Workout, AAA, and Airline applications. 

Others, such as time tracking applications that will automatically start running when you get to work make sense. The apple wallet application asking for location data makes sense so that it can lookup and associate your charges.

Other Applications don’t make as much sense. Why does my bluetooth enabled thermometer application need to know where I was when I took my temperature? Why does an insurance application want to know where I am when I’m accessing it? Who cares where I was when I made a voice memo? Why does Wallgreens want to know where I am?  These applications I can deny access on. But am I really prohibiting them from getting that information?.

There are dating applications that say they won’t operate at all unless they have access to location data. This is to narrow the search parameters to local parties. Okay, then why do I get hit on from people 6000 miles away? Suppose I don’t want to use the cruising part of the app? 

But it gets even more interesting when you dig deeper into system services, and significant locations. Yeah, I hadn’t told the system not to track my location. On the one hand the benefit is that your phone will keep track of where you parked your car. But does that data go anywhere? Or is that data simply used locally on the phone? 

Answers to these questions are ambiguous. Obviously the phone itself is transmitting it’s unique ID to the cellular provider. But what of the other data? 

I can tell the applications that they are denied cellular data services but does that mean that when the phone re-connects to the internet via WiFi at my home these application will send what they’ve recorded as a long data burst? Does denying cellular data access actually protect me from being tracked?

I’m suspicious of any government agency having easy access to my location. At the same time I recognize that the convenience afforded me by my cell phone is very cloying and that there’s a trade-off for convenience versus privacy.

There’s a cellular service called Patriotmobile.com part of their pitch is that they’ll help support Patriotic things and that they don’t sell your data. Okay fine, but if I have applications that are giving the data away, their service really doesn’t help.

That leaves using a VPN all the time. This solution is okay but I’ve had more than one situation where the VPN interfered with connectivity and created a less than convenient user experience. This is particularly true when the application updates.

I’ve got two VPN applications, One is part of my antivirus solution and the other is one that owns all their servers. I prefer the second one since the data isn’t just flowing through whatever server may be available.

After a while, I’d done all I could and opted to just turn off all the devices for a while. It’s clear that all of our technology has gotten away from us and significantly eroded our privacy. 

Unfortunately, I can’t come up with any solution about regaining my privacy short of a VPN solution all the time. But even then, while using a VPN you’re not actually in very much control of what Apps running on your phone may be doing. They could still send the actual location data via the VPN.  I’m going to have to think about this some more.

I can say I’m not going to opt in to the Apple/Google contact tracking application. The potential for abuse of that data is simply too big for my tastes.