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Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 11:27 am
by Tessa K
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 7:22 am
What nobody has explained is, since the trial is on Isle of Wight, do you push Button A or B if you are infected?
Ask the operator, she's listening to your call anyway while gossiping with her friends.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 11:42 am
by Gentleman Jim
Tessa K wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:27 am
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 7:22 am
What nobody has explained is, since the trial is on Isle of Wight, do you push Button A or B if you are infected?
Ask the operator, she's listening to your call anyway while gossiping with her friends.

Ah, the memories of age :lol:

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 11:57 am
by Tessa K
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:42 am
Tessa K wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:27 am
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 7:22 am
What nobody has explained is, since the trial is on Isle of Wight, do you push Button A or B if you are infected?
Ask the operator, she's listening to your call anyway while gossiping with her friends.

Ah, the memories of age :lol:
I wonder if they still have party lines? (not as exciting as they sound if you're too young to remember them)

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 4:13 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Tessa K wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:57 am
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:42 am
Tessa K wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:27 am


Ask the operator, she's listening to your call anyway while gossiping with her friends.

Ah, the memories of age :lol:
I wonder if they still have party lines? (not as exciting as they sound if you're too young to remember them)
Is it like a group Skype? Everyone jabbering at once over each other? I just got off a four-hour one.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 5:24 pm
by Lew Dolby
Had a party line when I were a kid. Until I worked it out, it really puzzled me how they could make one phone ring and not the other at the same time.

[t'were the only phone in the street (party was round the corner), got woke in the middle of the night freqently for people who needed a doc or ambulance. Weird now to think there was a time when few people had phones at home]

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 5:59 pm
by Opti
I haven't had an old steam landline for years.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 6:28 pm
by Tessa K
Lew Dolby wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 5:24 pm
Had a party line when I were a kid. Until I worked it out, it really puzzled me how they could make one phone ring and not the other at the same time.

[t'were the only phone in the street (party was round the corner), got woke in the middle of the night freqently for people who needed a doc or ambulance. Weird now to think there was a time when few people had phones at home]


My mum had to book a trunk call to her sister who was living in the US and then talk for a really short time because it was so expensive. Imagine what lockdown would be like if we still had only old tech.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Fri May 15, 2020 6:38 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Tessa K wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 6:28 pm
Lew Dolby wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 5:24 pm
Had a party line when I were a kid. Until I worked it out, it really puzzled me how they could make one phone ring and not the other at the same time.

[t'were the only phone in the street (party was round the corner), got woke in the middle of the night freqently for people who needed a doc or ambulance. Weird now to think there was a time when few people had phones at home]

My mum had to book a trunk call to her sister who was living in the US and then talk for a really short time because it was so expensive. Imagine what lockdown would be like if we still had only old tech.
My mum runs sheltered housing for the elderly and reports that a lot of them are really keen to get out, some of them even claiming they'd rather catch covid than remain isolated much longer.

The original UK argument about needing to time a lockdown carefully because people won't stick with it forever is likely correct, but it implies needing to shut down as soon as possible, before there are a lot of cases, not dithering till hundreds are dead already.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Sat May 16, 2020 2:23 am
by Millennie Al
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 6:38 pm
My mum runs sheltered housing for the elderly and reports that a lot of them are really keen to get out, some of them even claiming they'd rather catch covid than remain isolated much longer.
Except it's not just their own lives at risk as they're quite likely to pass it on to their neighbours either directly or via carers.
The original UK argument about needing to time a lockdown carefully because people won't stick with it forever is likely correct, but it implies needing to shut down as soon as possible, before there are a lot of cases, not dithering till hundreds are dead already.
Indeed. The earlier you lockdown the shorter it can be. Mathematically, if you can turn R into 1/R by lockdown, then the lockdown needs to last as long as the time from first case to lockdown.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Mon May 18, 2020 11:21 pm
by raven
I've just read in the Grauniad that US lockdown protests may have spread virus widely, cellphone data suggests . Ok, so protesters getting together will risk spreading it obviously, and they're eejits for not realising that. But this bit:
The anonymized location data was captured from opt-in cellphone apps, and data scientists at the firm VoteMap used it to determine the movements of devices present at protests in late April and early May in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.

They then created visualizations that tracked the movements of those devices up to 48 hours after the conclusion of protests. The visualizations only show movements within states, due to the queries analysts made in creating them. But the data scientist Jeremy Fair, executive-vice president of VoteMap, says that many of the devices that are seen to reach state borders are seen to continue across them in the underlying raw data.

One visualization shows that in Lansing, Michigan, after a 30 April protest in which armed protesters stormed the capitol building and state police were forced to physically block access to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, devices which had been present at the protest site can be seen returning to all parts of the state, from Detroit to remote towns in the state’s north.

Thought 1:Protesters go to protest. Opposing groups use some app to scoop up their data and track their journeys home. Ok, so that sounds super intrusive and it'd be terrible if a government did that. Oh wait...they probably already have.

Thought2: Good luck getting anyone to download a corona-virus tracking once they're read that. This isn't even officals doing it, it's some random group. Is location data ever secure?

Thought 3: The 'apps gathering tons of data on you and you don't even realise it' genie is well and truly out of the bottle and it's never going back inside. So does it really matter how private the coronavirus tracking apps are? This stuff is leaking all over the place anyway, at least with tracking apps it's being used for good.

Thought 4: Huh. Guess these particular protesters weren't worried about being tracked or they'd have left their phones at home. It's like they thought the powers that be were on their side or something... Although now this is out there, they might leave them behind next time.

(It's late. These thoughts may not be particularly coherent....)

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 3:35 pm
by dyqik
More organized protesters already use burner phones etc. when going to protests.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 4:51 pm
by Bird on a Fire
dyqik wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 3:35 pm
More organized protesters already use burner phones etc. when going to protests.
I suspect, though, that such behaviour is less common amongst groups who believe that law enforcement are on their side. There's probably a fair bit of overlap between these twunts and the Blue Lives Matter brigade, for example.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 5:12 pm
by dyqik
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 4:51 pm
dyqik wrote:
Tue May 19, 2020 3:35 pm
More organized protesters already use burner phones etc. when going to protests.
I suspect, though, that such behaviour is less common amongst groups who believe that law enforcement are on their side. There's probably a fair bit of overlap between these twunts and the Blue Lives Matter brigade, for example.
One of the more obvious memes in response to these idiots was a photo showing a heavily armed anti-lockdown protester screaming in the face of law-enforcement and the caption "Just like that, Blue Lives Didn't Matter anymore".

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 5:30 pm
by EACLucifer
The blue lives matter people notably seemed to not give a sh.t back when the armed mob occupying that wildlife refuge were boasting of positioning snipers to threaten police, either

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 6:23 pm
by Bird on a Fire
It's because Blue Lives Matter never meant anything other than "Black Lives Don't Matter".

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 7:51 pm
by Stranger Mouse
The Isle Of Wight app test is apparently problematic

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52725810

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 8:25 am
by Tessa K
And stories like this certainly won't help.
Outsourcing firm Serco has apologised after accidentally sharing the email addresses of almost 300 contact tracers.

The company is training staff to trace cases of Covid-19 for the UK government.

Serco wrote the email to tell new trainees not to contact its help desk looking for training details.

But the staff member who sent it put their email addresses in the CC section of the email, rather than the blind CC section - revealing them to every recipient.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52732818

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 8:55 am
by shpalman
Tessa K wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 8:25 am
And stories like this certainly won't help.
Outsourcing firm Serco has apologised after accidentally sharing the email addresses of almost 300 contact tracers.

The company is training staff to trace cases of Covid-19 for the UK government.

Serco wrote the email to tell new trainees not to contact its help desk looking for training details.

But the staff member who sent it put their email addresses in the CC section of the email, rather than the blind CC section - revealing them to every recipient.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52732818
Putting 300 email addresses in CC ought to be an offence in itself.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 9:55 am
by Gfamily
shpalman wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 8:55 am
Tessa K wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 8:25 am
And stories like this certainly won't help.
Outsourcing firm Serco has apologised after accidentally sharing the email addresses of almost 300 contact tracers.

The company is training staff to trace cases of Covid-19 for the UK government.

Serco wrote the email to tell new trainees not to contact its help desk looking for training details.

But the staff member who sent it put their email addresses in the CC section of the email, rather than the blind CC section - revealing them to every recipient.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52732818
Putting 300 email addresses in CC ought to be an offence in itself.
Any sensible email system should be configurable to automatically flag a "Should you be sending these as BCC rather than CC ?" for any new email that has more than 'n' people 'CC'd.

And it require more than a simple "click' to send regardless.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 12:55 pm
by headshot
They should be using a secure email distribution platform. BCC will result in a ton of those email going to spam.

I'd be hammering them with GDPR right now...

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 2:29 pm
by tom p
headshot wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 12:55 pm
They should be using a secure email distribution platform. BCC will result in a ton of those email going to spam.

I'd be hammering them with GDPR right now...
Big f.cking deal. 300 people who will be working together will have each others' email addresses now.
It's the most pathetically tiny thing ever.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 2:45 pm
by Bird on a Fire
tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 2:29 pm
headshot wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 12:55 pm
They should be using a secure email distribution platform. BCC will result in a ton of those email going to spam.

I'd be hammering them with GDPR right now...
Big f.cking deal. 300 people who will be working together will have each others' email addresses now.
It's the most pathetically tiny thing ever.
I agree about this particular instance, but it raises questions about the systems and training they're using for handling confidential patient information.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 2:55 pm
by tom p
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 2:45 pm
tom p wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 2:29 pm
headshot wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 12:55 pm
They should be using a secure email distribution platform. BCC will result in a ton of those email going to spam.

I'd be hammering them with GDPR right now...
Big f.cking deal. 300 people who will be working together will have each others' email addresses now.
It's the most pathetically tiny thing ever.
I agree about this particular instance, but it raises questions about the systems and training they're using for handling confidential patient information.
Not really. This is the helpdesk people or the training people writing to the would-be contact tracers. They don't have to use the same systems at all.
My HR colleagues communicate with us about payslips and the like via one secure system, whereas if it's, say, reminders of forthcoming days off, they use email; whereas I use a totally different secure system for permitting external stakeholders have access to some redacted data, and for trivial sh.t like this, like everyone else in the world, i use email.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 2:57 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Here's hoping. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some difference between your employer and a shady bargain-basement contractor like Serco though.

Re: Covid phone tracking

Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 3:16 pm
by tom p
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 20, 2020 2:57 pm
Here's hoping. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some difference between your employer and a shady bargain-basement contractor like Serco though.
well yes.
I was going to reply to your previous post that *this* isn't what raises questions about the systems they are going to use; the fact that it's SERCO raises such questions!