ArchangeGabriel
commented
4 years ago Many governments have made the use of such apps mandatory and will not let people move freely if they don't have it, while others have just recommended it, but might change in the future.
Do they ofter Android or iOS smartphones to everyone? My mother doesn’t even have a cellphone… Hopefully I live in a country that is still considered kind of a democracy, and the app is not mandatory at all.
I would like to remember that this is a whole different issue than private companies tracking users just for their own business. We are talking about public health and our own safety.
Yes, but often politics use this to restrain our freedom and make use of terrible event (this pandemic, terrorism) to make laws for our “safety”. This is called “The Shock Doctrine”, and I would quote a famous one by Benjamin Franklin here: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. Even if they seem tiny (but they actually aren’t), those apps are not a step in the right direction (while their effect for health will likely be very minor).
I am well aware that the results and effectivnes of such apps are yet to be clear but, for the prevention principle, I think it is important that people who wants have the chance to use such apps to protect their own health and the one of their closest ones.
Note that the app never protects you, only the other. While not using the app is not even a prevention principle: they are known ways this will be abused.
Of course I am raising the same issue to my own government and others, about why use such a Framework while they could do things in other ways. For example, my own italian government's app will use it, so I cannot use the app on my phone. While the norwegian government's app doesn't, and I have been able to download and use theirs without any problem. So it means that the technology needed to make such tracking work dont' necessasily must rely on the A/G framework, it's just a decision taken by governments and developers.
Yes, but often it’s laughable. The french government decided to not use Apple/Google decentralized framework (because sovereignty and privacy, and I kind of agree with that), and instead use a centralized solution powered by… Microsoft. So much for sovereignty and privacy.
But, since we cannot rely on the fact that our governments will listen to us and move away from such freakin' framework, we should give the chance to people to still be protected from Google's malware, but at the same time try to protect our health by using the COVID-19 tracing apps.
Anyhow, this is a duplicate of https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_GmsCore/issues/1057. Where you will learn than the man issue is manpower: @mar-v-in, microG main and almost sole dev, has been focusing on other topic for a while, and might only return to microG at some point later. They are already a bunch of issues at hand, and implementing all this framework correctly is not an easy task and will likely not be achieved. However, you might rejoice that Google will likely integrate it in AOSP directly in the future.
echeoquehaii
eggercomputerchaos
mar-v-in
I know this sounds strange, but this is really important if we want to keep using microg in the next months or years.
Apple and Google have developed a new framework that will be used by many governmental apps for the tracking of possible infections of COVID-19. Many governments have made the use of such apps mandatory and will not let people move freely if they don't have it, while others have just recommended it, but might change in the future. I would like to remember that this is a whole different issue than private companies tracking users just for their own business. We are talking about public health and our own safety. I am well aware that the results and effectivnes of such apps are yet to be clear but, for the prevention principle, I think it is important that people who wants have the chance to use such apps to protect their own health and the one of their closest ones.
Of course I am raising the same issue to my own government and others, about why use such a Framework while they could do things in other ways. For example, my own italian government's app will use it, so I cannot use the app on my phone. While the norwegian government's app doesn't, and I have been able to download and use theirs without any problem. So it means that the technology needed to make such tracking work dont' necessasily must rely on the A/G framework, it's just a decision taken by governments and developers.
But, since we cannot rely on the fact that our governments will listen to us and move away from such freakin' framework, we should give the chance to people to still be protected from Google's malware, but at the same time try to protect our health by using the COVID-19 tracing apps.