Contrary to what some people are foaming about, contact tracing is not a secret and nefarious government project which is designed to squeeze information out of you before you and yours are sent to Quarantine Camps to die. It is a normal investigative technique that has an immense value on figuring out how a sickness spreads and how where and and who got it started. This has been done pretty much since Pasteur saw the little bugs in the microscope, so it is far from some Facebook/Bill Gates conspiracy to chip everybody and fore people to buy Apple Products.
From TB to syphilis to smallpox, every single one of their breakouts was not only treated with the correspondent medications and therapies, but with an investigation on how it got passed along. Hell, go ask your grandparents what was the procedure when back in the day somebody ended up with a drippy dick.
So chill, you are not legally to respond to any questions. Just say you are busy and have no idea how you got the clap…er… Wuhan V. and hang up the phone.
“Hell, go ask your grandparents what was the procedure when back in the day somebody ended up with a drippy dick.”
Ugh… I just had a flashback to the educational VD films they made us watch at my catholic high school in the 80’s. They old and made to make you think abstinence or getting your junk chopped off were the only options.
Worse part were the lack of censorship on them images of diseased male copulatory organs or what the treatments were… back in the freaking 50’s! 😮
:::shudder:::
In normal times with normal politicians, I would agree with you. With governors threatening to have people dragged out of the water and setting up snitch lines, I’ll put it up against the ‘jews in the attic’ test.
You still don’t have to answer…
People you’ve been in contact with may not know that, or may not care. And if there’s a sudden “need to take action against domestic terrorism”, wouldn’t it be “entirely reasonable” to mine that handy contact database …?
Because they are about to get into a list for the first time in their lives? And those with a respiratory affection are deemed terrorists that require action?
Miguel: naw, not like that. But I suspect you yourself would not find it difficult to imagine how, say, Mr. Dellum, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. DeBlasio, Dr. Northam,, or Mrs. Whitmer, or one of their lackeys not possessed of the ethical restraint those worthies have, might repurpose that information.
“Well, after my face-to-face meeting with one of the governor’s staff, I sent some quality time at (insert big box store here). Then I went to (name of enormous hospital system mother ship), to get checked out. I told them I was (common name from phone book), because, you know, those goonish health contact tracers. Don’t wanta get on any list!”
When I was diagnosed with Tuberculosis, I personally called every person I’d seen for the past 2 months. Teachers, professors, medical folks, ranchers, every damn person. I took it upon myself to do so. Drowning in my own personal blood was bad enough, and I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to have to go through it . Much less my friends. Fortunately, I didn’t infect anyone else, to the best of my knowledge and due diligence.
Harris County Health, not so much. I’ve applied for as a job as a Covid contact tracker, yeah. The money’s good. And I have background in this
JC cOLLINS: good onya. otoh, with declining trust in .gov at all levels (see nearby story ref 100+% voted turnout for only one stimulus to that skepticism), contract tracing elicits thoughts of Sandbox “starfish” Intel analysis.
You are correct, that sort of gu m s h o e (f’ing ottokerect!) NUrsng is the bread-and-butter of epidemic control, in any thoughtful control strategy. Nur s
Works ok in high trust societies.
Reminds me of the 80s and 90s with the tracking chip in the hand crowd. Besides, look in your hand or your pocket- you already have a “tracking device” – its called a smart phone. If you dont want to be tracked leave the phone home and drive an old car. How many of ya have a “rewards card” from stores? How many of ya instantly reel off personal information to strangers to save a nickel? Ive watched pretty gals give out phone number name n address with no hesitation while droolin pervs soak it up. The gubmint dont have the manpower to track 350MILLION people. Just be like gubmint and cnn- LIE!
There are a couple of people/companies that are looking in to contract tracing with zero information spill.
Your phone broadcasts a random token every couple of minutes. If your phone received one of these tokens it stores it locally.
If you go to hospital and they decide that you have the crud, they ask for all the tokens you have transmitted in the last 3 weeks. The health system then publishes those tokens.
Your phone gets the list of crud tokens from the health system and checks it against the tokens it has received, if there are enough it tells you that you have been exposed. One picture worth of tokens would be able to store around 160,000 tokens or 2700 people-token hours (spending 2700 hours near one person transmitting or 270 hours near 10 people transmitting)
So the technology is there to do contact tracing and tracking with zero personal information leakage.
If course this same tech could be corrupted just but forcing the app to phone home and dump all your tokens to a central database with your personal info. This is the actual issue. Government wants the phone home style while the privacy people want the zero leakage model.