In general, many companies and government agencies do not have great security. “But I’m not the biggest fan of third parties creating the app. “Apple-Google is trying to help the pandemic by creating a solution that brings better transparency and the development community together at this time,” Messdaghi observes. Presumably this will get done for all of the models in wide use, not just the latest models.Ĭhloé Messdaghi, vice president at Point3 Security, a supplier of workforce training systems, notes that third party developers can include local government agencies, as well as for-profit software developers. Meanwhile, the Apple-Google team is focusing on designing systems that will be needed to embed a variety of contact-tracing apps into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms. First, the Apple-Google team released an API to the development community and invited any and all software developers to design contract-tracing apps leveraging Bluetooth IDs. The Apple-Google project is proceeding on two tracks. “Viola! That phone identity checks in and Bluetooth communication is used to send alerts to anyone who came into close proximity of the infected person.” Third-party app designs “When a person gets sick, they can choose to reveal that information via their phone identity,” Kumar says. And each phone keeps a log of all of the Bluetooth IDs of phones that come within its range.” Each Bluetooth ID is represented by a set of random numbers, and there is no easy way to reverse map the Bluetooth IDs back to specific phone users. “All smartphones are constantly transmitting their identities using Bluetooth. ![]() “The core idea is pretty simple,” says Ambuj Kumar, CEO of Fortanix, a supplier of advanced encryption systems. “The only data the server gets is a privacy-preserving ‘Bluetooth ID’ of the users who agrees to share their Bluetooth ID with the server. “It is a ‘mostly de-centralized’ approach, where most of the data never leaves the user’s device, in order to protect the user’s privacy as much as possible,” says Alban Diquet, the head of engineering at Data Theorem, a supplier of application security solutions. ![]() The server then alerts the non-infected persons to self-immunize. Infected persons will be able to use their iPhones or Android devices to make their status known to a central server, which then correlates an anonymized identifier of the infected person to anonymized IDs of non-infected persons who happen to be in close proximity. Here’s how technologists and privacy experts see things stacking up: Bluetooth-based tracing In fact, the Apple-Google project has exacerbated a privacy controversy that flared up in Europe in the early stages, one that has more recently been picking up steam in the U.S., as well. In doing so, their proposed solution has a number of glaring technical and privacy-protection shortcomings, according to several technologists I spoke with. However, in an apparent effort to live down Google’s abjectly poor track record respecting consumer privacy, the Apple-Google partnership is treading lightly to avoid anything that might hint at an undue invasion of individual privacy. The tech giants are laudably putting aside any competitive urgings to co-develop a solution that combines mobile operating system, Bluetooth and GPS technologies to help us all get past the burgeoning health crisis. If the devastating health and economic ramifications weren’t enough, individual privacy is also in the throes of being profoundly and permanently disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.Īpple and Google are partnering up to bring technology to bear on COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. The tech giants are partnering on a tool for public good, but critics worry it will ultimately get used for predatory surveillance
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