Sarah Jamie Lewis

Secondly, If - as speculated - any attempt is made to make access to services dependent on the revelation of healthcare status, then I will happily direct every spare moment I can afford into enumerating & distributing ways to undermine such an immoral and harmful practice.

Third, the Canadian Federal and Provincial governments can't even prevent hospitals from broadcasting plaintext patient health records across major cities. There is no history of competent handling of healthcare data to back up any privacy claim.https://twitter.com/OpenPriv/status/1171058991306133507 …

(Vancouver Healthcare Authority did stop broadcasting diagnosis in the data nearly a year after @OpenPriv reported the breach - so that's something right...https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1177640385071308801 …)

I don't even need to get into the details of "does the actual contact tracing app work?" because it's redundant in the context of a collection of governments and healthcare authorities that have demonstrated no ability to maintain private healthcare data.

Forth, but on the point of "do contact tracing apps actually work to prevent deanonymization" the answer is "kind of", the whole problem space is full of edge cases and wireless tracking mitigation is mostly built on flaky assumptions about bluetooth homogeneity.

RAN surveillance, as we understand it most-cellphones, is a 30 year old science well understood by advertisers, surveillance entities and some academics - I'd put money on it winning out over any scheme given modest timelines.

post*-cellphones

Fifth, mostly, I want to set a counter to the current trend of pessimistic privacy responses to the announcement of such tools. Privacy violations around healthcare aren't something we should expect or endure, they are aberrations that should not be tolerated in a free society.

Open Privacy (@OpenPriv) doesn't believe in privacy by regulation. Privacy that a government or corporation can give you, can be taken just as easily. That's why we dedicate efforts to building truly consensual technology (and publicly revealing bad systems for what they are).

So I'm not calling for clarity on regulation, or expecting politicians to answer nuanced questions about threat models, or calling on businesses to reject medical screening. Because I don't believe in asking nicely for fundamental rights, I believe in defending them.