ncase
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Protecting Lives & Liberty: How Contact Tracing Beats COVID-19 and Big Brother
🕑 Added 2020-04-10 21:14:31 +0000 UTC(4 minute comic + 4 minute update)
Thank you so much for your feedback on my previous comic (a collaboration with an epidemiologist) about why we need contact tracing to beat COVID-19.
Our new comic is about how.
A few of you (thanks Voyage Goya!) brought up a dang good concern: privacy. Does beating COVID-19 mean mass surveillance? Giving up our privacy, our rights?
HECK NO
And here's a one-page version:
You can share this comic via the Twitter thread or the standalone website!
. . .
Q: What about folks without smartphones?
A: Like how folks who can't get flu shots are protected if enough others do so, the smartphone-less are protected if ~60% of others get the app!
Q: Will even that be enough to suppress the virus (R<1)?
A: Ferretti & Wymant study says yes if >60% isolation+quarantine... but I'm pessimistic, so my guess is we'll have to supplement this with face masks + strict hygiene + no handshakes, to get R<1. (which South Korea & Taiwan do) But at least it's not a lockdown! Normal-ish life! CafΓ©s! Bookstores! Just... with masks.
Q: Will people really self-quarantine? Will their bosses let them?
A: Sadly this is policy, not science. But: I didn't expect the US to flip from denial to lockdowns so quickly, let alone hand out free cash to everyone. So it may be possible to make a govt policy of paying people & their bosses a month of lost money, if they need to self-isolate for 14 days. Carrot > Stick. Cheaper than lockdown, anyway. (As for cheating, DP^3T has a cryptographic mechanism for people to prove they were exposed.)
Q: Are the Western govts getting on this?
A: Yes! Netherlands & some US cities even specifically endorsed privacy-first Bluetooth solutions like the one above. And today, Apple & Google teamed up on a Bluetooth API! Like... I don't trust Apple or Google... but with the protocol described above, they could hoard all the random messages they want and still learn absolute zilch.
Q: When do these apps come out?
A: DP^3T and COVID Watch say they're going beta next week. :)
. . .
I know this sounds like I'm begging for shares, but it's really important that the public knows this asap: contact tracing does NOT mean mass surveillance. Just today, Ezra Klein (who I otherwise respect) called the test & trace strategy a βsurveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportionsβ.
Jeez. At best that's nudging people to accept (more) mass surveillance. At worst it's making people reject the only strategy we know of so far that can protect our long-term public health, mental health, and financial health.
π₯So! Please retweet & link the good word! π₯
Folks need to know: privacy-protecting contact tracing can be done.
It already has.
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3 More Updates:
1)
Speaking of COVID-19 strategies, that's what my next explorable explanation is about! (collab with same epidemiologist)
Here's a 2-minute video on Twitter, or on YouTube.
TL;DR β Stay determined. Epidemiologists & policy groups are converging on the same answer: in a couple months, life can return to normal(ish).
2)
I was a fool & a lemming about "healthy public shouldn't wear masks".
Thank you Jonathan from the comments for linking me a paper on the effectiveness of home-made cloth masks, which made me slowly change my mind! And the CDC recently changed their mind too, to encourage what the South Korean/Taiwanese govts encouraged from the beginning:
Wear a mask.
There's a shortage, so make a cloth one for now. It's unclear if masks protect you from getting COVID-19, but they definitely protect others from your droplets β and we now know you can transmit COVID-19 even if you aren't showing symptoms yet.
Anyway, here's a tutorial on how I made two masks out of my bra.
3)
Remember when I said I was gonna take a sabbatical-vacation to a) travel, b) be with people I love, c) and try new things?
Yeah those first two aren't happening anymore.
But I did try lots of new things in the past few weeks! I made two comics, two videos, and two DIY crafts tutorials.
I like this. I got into making explorable explanations because it felt fresh & exciting, but doing it constantly made it feel... not that anymore.
So, a change to this Patreon:
β "I make interactive simulations about systems"
β
"I make playful things"
Those could be explorable explanations, but also: comics, videos, games, songs, zines, short stories, DIY craft tutorials β anything! But I promise all my work will still be:
1) Free as in beer
2) Free as in speech (Public Domain, CC at least)
3) Safe For Work (If I do make NSFW stuff, it'll be a new Patreon. I mean... a few of you ordered monster girls back when I had the custom-drawn character rewards, and, yeah I could do that for a living)
4) Something I intrinsically want to create.
I think, in hard times, we could all use more playful things.
Stay safe & sane, y'all!
π,
~ Nicky Case
Comments
Rachel Winchester
From a government perspective, it's super-simple to correlate the phone's location with the nearby cell tower, as phones continually beacon towers. Once you've got one phone, you can then get all the others it's exchanging contract trace messages with. At that point, you've got the same duration and frequency data of phone proximity as the hospitals (or, say, anyone with Facebook Messenger installed on their phone).
Rachel Winchester
This plan is perfectly correct in theory, but in practice it's extremely unlikely that any commercial company will provide a perfectly clean and non-tracking app, because they will want to collect market data such as the GPS locations of who is using it. They will also be under pressure to provide the apps for free, which means they will need to make up their money somehow, so they will be under pressure to update the app to correlate additional data to monetize.
Voyage Goya
Woah, thank you for your detailed answer to my worries! Since my last comment, I have read some overview on the currently considered deconfinement systems in Europe (well, mainly in France, where I live), with apps working with only Bluetooth and informed consent installation, so I had begun to consider that it *was* possible to find a middle ground. Yet your post really comforts us in the fact that such a middle ground exists. And with sources. Thanks a lot! Keep trying new things and enjoying what you do, passion is still one of the best driving forces in life :D PS: For some reason, although I know they're just rectangles with a face, your little smartphones exchanging gibberish are oddly cute! PPS: I knew Bill Cipher was Big Brother all long.
Lorenz Klopfenstein
Hello! Loved this comic, great job! Just one question, I wasn't able to find the ~60% coverage need citation? Could you provide a link if possible? Thank you so much π
Aurimas
I love the comic! The DP-3T algorithm seems to address all the privacy aspects and solves the issue at hand (COVID-19). I wonder, though, what are the implications of getting a large number of people getting used to installing apps from government. Contact tracing is surely a concept that makes many law enforcement agencies and not-that-sincere governments very excited... It can be abused, and I hope we are smart enough to prevent that in the future, while still using it today to solve our current issue!
