I wouldn't necessarily oppose stricter measures for people who do this sort of work. easy for me to say when I don't work in a nursing home, of course. in principle, it would be comparable to the privacy you give up when you have to get a security clearance for your job.

> The reason contact tracing has modest privacy implications is that the location history of most people isn't sensitive information (or exists already, with little additional harm incurred by giving it to public health workers). It's fine if you disagree with me on that point, but that's my argument, it isn't super serious if Bill over at the county health department sees that you encountered a sick individual at Wendy's, which is going to be the majority of the data.

I can certainly understand that my position looks a lot like closing the barn doors after the horses have already run five miles down the road. google has the gall to actually send me an email each month showing all the places it has tracked me going. even if I delete my facebook account, it can still recognize my face in pictures other people take.

I'm not happy about any of this, but at least now, the government has to put on some charade of formality to access this information. giving it the power to directly collect this data in plain view is another step in the wrong direction. it adds more stuff to the pile of things we need to undo to get where I personally want to be.

I don't think your argument is unreasonable, just that we're approaching this from different perspectives. you're thinking about "how many people can we bring with us to the other side?", while I'm thinking more about "what do we want the other side to look like?".