@lupyuen I think cryptographers were far too willing to promote tracing in general by coming up with "private" schemes for it. Those schemes helped legitimize the idea in general, including the versions with no privacy at all.

@pete Yeah now I deeply regret our govt adopting a Bespoke Centralised Model for Contact Tracing ... Was that chosen to enable police tracking? 🤔

@lupyuen Almost certainly yes. Remember from an epidemiology point of view, lots of people were saying the privacy-preserving versions wouldn't work very well anyway. So no surprise there was pressure on multiple angles to have privacy in name only.

Fact is the contact tracing efforts have found that it mainly spreads at hospitals, at essential jobs, and within families. The short encounters that tracing apps monitor best don't matter anyway. You need relatively long exposure to get infected.

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