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We went through GPS, network cells and other technologies evaluating them on privacy, systems scalability, reliability and precision of the signals. The latter is a crucial point, since it impacts on false positive/negative classifications and ultimately on the trust in the solution.
We went through GPS, network cells and other technologies evaluating them on privacy, systems scalability, reliability and precision of the signals. The latter is a crucial point, since it impacts on false positive/negative classifications and ultimately on the trust in the solution.
A list of our technology candidates follows:
A list of our technology candidates follows:
- NO - GPS or other “positioning satellites” based solutions: we gave up immediately with GPS, as we understood that it would have led to locking down millions of people, at every minimum suspect case of infection. Losing soon its street credibility would have been a matter of days.
You know, from any navigation app, that the resolution of your location varies. A lot. The positioning satellites cannot know where you are, while it is your device who calculates its own position, based on the perceived distance from many geo-static satellites. The problem is, when just a few of these satellites are “visible”, or none at all. So, the location precision can degrade down to kilometers range, signaling as met even people you didn’t see. Coincidentally, this blurring happens exactly in the most potentially infectious and populated urban situations, like in office buildings, factories, restaurants, discos, tunnels, stadiums, stations and in metal coated vehicles, like trains, airplanes, buses. Just to mention our top of mind.
- NO - GPS or other “positioning satellites” based solutions: we gave up immediately with GPS, as we understood that it would have led to locking down millions of people, at every minimum suspect case of infection. Losing soon its street credibility would have been a matter of days.
You know, from any navigation app, that the resolution of your location varies. A lot. The positioning satellites cannot know where you are, while it is your device who calculates its own position, based on the perceived distance from many geo-static satellites. The problem is, when just a few of these satellites are “visible”, or none at all. So, the location precision can degrade down to kilometers range, signaling as met even people you didn’t see. Coincidentally, this blurring happens exactly in the most potentially infectious and populated urban situations, like in office buildings, factories, restaurants, discos, tunnels, stadiums, stations and in metal coated vehicles, like trains, airplanes, buses. Just to mention our top of mind.
- NO - Telephony network towers based solutions: we didn’t even think about it but a famous government consultant told us that it would have been the preferred solution In his words, like intelligence analysts are supposed to do. So, we gave a try to this legendary technology, but it resulted in a worse signaling than the GPS one: average ranges of some few kilometers. The smartphone is always connected to a ground based antenna (tower locations here). So, your mobile carrier knows which one it is and where it is mounted. Keywords to search for: MCC, MNC, LAC, CellID, here an explanation. On the device side, iOS discloses to the apps, the antenna’s country and the carrier you are connected to, through its API “CoreTelephony”. Some more info to the apps from Android through the API “Telephony”, you can test using this app from its store. But in any case, the only interesting application is for statistical purposes, like inferring people's mobility by counting the gross switching antenna connections. From another perspective, solutions based on network carriers don’t allow the citizens to opt out (but turning off their smartphones). Privacy and political profiles would get hot this way, and a spontaneous collaboration of citizens would be implicitly deterred in all democratic countries.
- NO - Telephony network towers based solutions: we didn’t even think about it but a famous government consultant told us that it would have been the preferred solution In his words, like intelligence analysts are supposed to do. So, we gave a try to this legendary technology, but it resulted in a worse signaling than the GPS one: average ranges of some few kilometers. The smartphone is always connected to a ground based antenna (tower locations here). So, your mobile carrier knows which one it is and where it is mounted. Keywords to search for: MCC, MNC, LAC, CellID, here an explanation. On the device side, iOS discloses to the apps, the antenna’s country and the carrier you are connected to, through its API “CoreTelephony”. Some more info to the apps from Android through the API “Telephony”, you can test using this app from its store. But in any case, the only interesting application is for statistical purposes, like inferring people's mobility by counting the gross switching antenna connections. From another perspective, solutions based on network carriers don’t allow the citizens to opt out (but turning off their smartphones). Privacy and political profiles would get hot this way, and a spontaneous collaboration of citizens would be implicitly deterred in all democratic countries.
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