In the wake of the current Corona crisis, an unlikely team of former adversaries has formed:
Google and Apple have decided to “work together” and release pseudo-anonymized – in the case of Google, a per-country-release – sets of mobility data. Considering the crisis, many people see this as a helpful gesture where a big tech company is going out of its way to “donate” their data in a charity move.
The real reason behind this is to whitewash the ongoing, extreme and gapless collection of data of literally all of us. Considering that Android OS along with Apples iOS are at the sole top of the smartphone OS summit, this duopoly is in souverain controll of the record of our every steps.
The elegantly sorted and cleaned up release of the data shows just how precise a company like Google can filter, identify and tailor information, ready to be sold to marketing-firms, pharmacies, executive forces, single political parties, entire state administrations and literally every other possible entity that has an interest in a specific set of data for good or nefarious reasons.
The good cause
So what exactly is a good reason? Is it to create an App that seemingly protects us from contracting and passing on Covid-19? Is the novel company Novid-20, registered in Panama¹, like the many honest working people from the long-forgotten “panama papers” scandal, a charitable, altruistic organization?
The website of the app producer NOVID-20 is a slick, cool design that reminds you of the likes of data brokers such as optimizely.com. At the core team sits Martin Drexler, Advisor AI-Product & Corporate Strategy, worldwide active marketing specialist.²
Within a short time period, a team of internationally successful marketing specialists, app programmers and lawyers has come together to work on the charitable, “philantropic” (as they describe themselves) cause to provide an app that will heal us all.
The data hungry chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz, has in the past entertained talks “in privacy” with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and someone from Palantir, in short: the major spyware producers of the US. Shortly after the outbreak of the Corona virus in Europe, Sebastian Kurz has dreamed of implementing a mandatory app to monitor every citizen in Austria and record interactions via Bluetooth and WiFi signals of smartphones at a certain proximity.
Even critical media has jumped the bangwagon in favor of the implementation of such an app, including the state media ORF.at and the usually very critical and independently working VKI (consumer service).
After the release of a contradicting article on the VKI website, criticism was mentioned via a larger-than-usual amount of negative ratings by users (around 200, average would be 5-10) and a series of critical comments:
https://www.konsument.at/corona-app-des-roten-kreuzes-042020
After a week of white-washing the intentions of the App, which is being endorsed by the Red Cross in Austria – same as banks use famous sports celebrities as the face of their product campagnes – the austrian state news have released the following statement by the independent ARGE Daten:
“Hands off this app. It is not fit for practical usage”
ARGE Daten, April 15 2020
¹ https://www.whois.com/whois/novid20.org
² https://www.novid20.org/en/about-us
A “horoscope marksmanship”
In detail, the usage of the app was analyzed and deemed impractical, because the mere connection of devices via Bluetooth of WiFi, exchanging hashed keys and registering a certain duration of “interaction” as a possible moment of contracting the disease, was found to be completely abritrary.
The record taken of people merely being in close proximity says nothing about the interaction, like having a handshake, wearing a mask while speaking or the exact distance at the time of conversation. The amount of entropic data is still greater than the amount of useful and meaningful data that could ever be derived from such a hap-hazardly introduced app.
Additionally, the fact that – thankfully! – the app is not mandatory and therefore only used by a small amount of people, renders it pointless. Only a near 100% implementation of the app would carry the argument of the connection data having any base at all, and even if this was the case, as stated above and analyzed by ARGE Daten, the collected data could merely be a source of paranoid speculation.
The accuracy of what the data could tell you about the possible contact with an infected Covid-19 person could be apptly compared to reading your horoscope for the day.
Connecting to the big data companies
Having realized what is going on, the obvious connections are in plain sight as is:
The app uses Microsoft Azure Cloud services and connects with Google servers for the likely usage of software libraries and toolkits. By design, the app is dependent on the services in order to function properly. The core features of the app have been programmed with these dependencies out in the open.
To make matters worse – or better to say, to be openly secretive about the background workings of the app – NOVID-20 has declined to open the source code for the independent evaluation. Even after the vast criticism of this circumstance, the app developers have taken almost a week or maybe even longer in what seems to be a “cleansing” of the source code in order to probably – maybe, maybe not! – release the source code afterall.
Anonymity by design, impossible by choice
Ever since the advent of geocities and subsequently social networks, the possibility of having your “own website” made within minutes, using pre-fabricated toolkits and webdesigns, was set on a course of endless success. No standard user is ready or even able to program their own website, let alone more complicated features such as a webshop. And since hardly anyone likes to constantly exploit their IT friend or even pay someone to do the job, “free services” like the data mining tools by Google and other providers are used:
– font kits
– analytics tools
– webdesign kits
– advertising and statistics tools
To name only a few of the services that people today consider to be either “free to use” or at least included in their webhost plan. In this respect, Google has the unprecedented monopoly on “free to use” webkits.
With this mindset, outsourcing the services to data brokers, it has been made the absolute standard to indirectly give away both the data of your potential customers and your own business data as well. Subsequently, when it comes to health concerning apps and services, any such implementation creates a myriad of disadvantages to the customer, who’s data is being used in ways that are always by design out of his range of controll.
so-called
” Free to use “
We know everything about your business and your visitors. – Google
The secretive panama app that means to save us all
In conclusion, the highly suspicious and openly privacy infringing foundation of this app lease only reason to worry and no hopes to help us in anyway whatsoever!
It is with these thoughts in mind that we need to be very careful about what our government leaders are trying to pass on as the ultimate savior, while they are really selling us snake oil.
1984, from dystopia to reality 