Law in the Internet Society

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MarvinGallowaySecondEssay 3 - 07 Jan 2021 - Main.EbenMoglen
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
 

Privacy in the age of COVID-19

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 It may be accepted that technology can significantly aid in tracing and tracking COVID-19 infections and even monitor quarantine mandates, as apps currently do in Singapore for example. However, we should ask ourselves whether such widespread rollout of contract tracing applications should remain a common feature of our societies following the pandemic. Numerous developments that were once seen as temporary measures evolved too often into staples of our daily lives, and we tend to forget the events that led to their employment. What for example will happen to tracking protocols when the coronavirus is only a distant memory, if that is ever the case of course, and a government pushes tracing onto its citizens for reasons that have little to do with curbing the spread of infectious diseases. What access do developers of mobile operating systems such as Apple for iOS and Google for Android have to the data that records congregations of people? After all, the low-energy Bluetooth feature only became the basis on which the Corona-Warn app functions following its implementation by such companies.
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This draft could be improved if its understanding of the subject began from what the current draft ends on, namely that this had nothing to do with the German government, but was the result of the design for tracking APIs jointly developed by Google and Apple, to provide a worldwide technical solution. Countries like UK that began by designing their own approaches to the application mostly abandoned them to use the Google and Apple APIs, because they were otherwise too far from the crucial issue in the smartphone software: battery consumption. If the handset is to do the work, rather than a centralized surveillance system, which Apple and Google were designing to avoid, only the OS and hardware manufacturers can solve the relevant problem: a handset cannot help if its battery is dead.

In the end, it turned out that the smartphone proximity tracking solution might have been more useful with a different disease in a different set of societies. As you point out in the German example, which is just one example (the next draft would benefit from a little more information about the world, which does not only consist of Germany), the virus escaped control so rapidly that both the amount and the quality of mobile phone proximity data for tracking was inadequate to make a difference. The societies that did best at controlling the virus, like Vietnam, did not depend on smartphone applications at all.

Here too, you submitted a sketchy complete first draft days before the grading deadline, not leaving enough time for the required revision. You are better off with no grade on the transcript at this point than the marker of inadequate performance. Please submit an email message requesting an extension, so I do not have to submit a grade on Jan 8th, and we can work on the required revisions, which will undoubtedly make the draft better. You might find useful Andrew Roth, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Daniel Boffey, Oliver Holmes and Helen Davidson, Growth in surveillance may be hard to scale back after pandemic, experts say, The Guardian, April 14, 2020

 
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Revision 3r3 - 07 Jan 2021 - 18:32:09 - EbenMoglen
Revision 2r2 - 05 Jan 2021 - 01:24:58 - MarvinGalloway
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