Maciej Ceglowski asks for a massive surveillance program to defeat COVID-19.
However, as I mentioned on twitter — there IS an alternative, privacy-preserving approach, which is what is being done in Singapore with their TraceTogether app.
In summary, everyone carries a phone running an app which has an anonymized a random ID, scans local Bluetooth periodically for other people’s apps with their random IDs, and records them locally (not uploading to a server). If you find out you have COVID-19 you then trigger an upload of your contact history to a central server. That server then broadcasts out the list of IDs, and everyone you’ve been in contact with will then get a ping on their app to get tested, self-isolate, etc.
No central surveillance, no creepy big brother watching your location.
My pinboard has a few more write-ups on basically the same idea from various other places, including MIT. This is similar to what China’s app does, but (as far as I can tell) with more privacy.
It looks like the Singaporean government digital services team behind TraceTogether is putting together an open source version, at Bluetrace.io.
IMO we have to do this or we will never get out of COVID-19 lockdown before 2021. I am massively in favour of adopting this approach in Ireland and across the world.