I just don't want to be tracked, ever, for any reason, by anyone. It doesn't matter how the system works or how private it is. It still normalizes surveillance to those who participate, and I won't :)
> I just don't want to be tracked, ever, for any reason, by anyone.
Curious what this means to you in practice? I'm trying to imagine what zero tracking looks like... and wondering if I misunderstand what you mean by "ever, for any reason, by anyone." or if you're really serious about your wish and mean it as literally as it sounds.
You don't want your doctor to have records of your previous visits? (Prefer to be offered the Covid Vaccine every time from now on?) You don't want the ability to have any personal bank / investment accounts? Our HN account & posts are being "tracked", what's an alternative to this discussion? How should governments manage the basics of things like social security or driver's licenses? How would anyone even contact you or employ you without some kind of telephone number or internet address that can be tracked? How would you find gainful employment, and do you want to re-negotiate your compensation daily?
Framing all information storage as "tracking" and all information retrieval as "surveillance" seems to turn a blind eye to the many benefits we enjoy, while stoking a general and vague fear. I think I'm more privacy conscious than most, and I think we have some massive privacy issues at the moment, but I have to recognize the benefits I enjoy at the same time and seek to find a reasonable and practical balance. So, I accept some tracking, and what I want is always opt-in by default and control over who tracks what.
You'll be tracked, it'll just be worse and not in a way that protects your privacy.
You'll also be generally ignored by people that care about solving these problems.
You'll also make it harder for people that care about the distinction between pragmatic solutions that protect privacy and simple solutions that don't.
When your response to both is the same the response from governments is: "the privacy people are going to complain no matter what, so just ignore them".
Your comment is basically an example of the kind of misleading knee-jerk response I was talking about. The bluetooth alerting design is not tracking, but your response to it is more likely to lead to solutions that are.
Clever technological solutions can allow us to preserve privacy and still do important hard things. The bluetooth exposure notification design is an example of that, people that care about privacy should be excited about it.
Second order effect arguments are often weak, in this case - not using a cleverly designed system that doesn't track them because it could make some theoretical person more comfortable with the idea of tracking in general doesn't hold up to me.
The point of this is that it doesn't track them, but still achieves the goal of exposure notifications.
It's like the seat-belts are worse argument - if people wear seatbelts they'll drive more dangerously therefore seatbelts are bad. These type of second order arguments can sound contrarian or smart, but they rarely hold up to scrutiny. (Similarly masks are bad because they make people touch their face or w/e nonsense was pushed early on in the pandemic).
The average person is tracked completely by modern web companies, telcos, and random apps and they give up that willingly already - how does privacy preserving contact tracing make that worse? I don't buy it.
It's more likely using services that preserve privacy by design get people to understand why they're different than everything else, and why that's valuable. When you dismiss them along with the bad ones you make it harder for people to make that distinction.
Your point of view will drive the deployment of fully passive tracking, where you have absolutely no say in how/when/which data is collected. Things like pervasive cameras, cell tower dumps, etc., will become the norm whether you want it or not, but with the added downside that you have not say in it.
