U.S. govt, tech industry discuss using location data to combat coronavirus
The interesting thing about ideas like this is that they reveal how authoritarianism during times of stability does a terrible amount of damage during times of crisis.<p>This is the sort of problem that <i>could</i> be solved in a better world; collecting location data to find interactions between people <i>would</i> allow you to get them tested faster and prevent a disease from spreading. But it simply can't be done in this country primarily because everyone has the <i>entirely reasonable</i> fear that the feds want this power for nefarious reasons and will never give it up - and they're probably right.<p>If we had a society where privacy was an absolute right, and civic trust in our community organizations and institutions was built up over time, during a crisis like this one we could come together and find agreement on a way of providing this data to a responsible institution that would use it only for the purpose of saving lives and then delete it when the crisis was over. And they'd lose access to future data at that point too. Anyone who still didn't trust the communal institutions could opt out, but the point of building up this trust is that it makes people want to work together and feel safe doing so.<p>We're so far from that in this country that we're not only paranoid about privacy issues, it seems altogether most likely that our secret agencies are actively planning to exploit this crisis to be able to spy on us in the future.