Crowd-source measurements

[haveyaseen]

Collect and analyze raw data in a testing phase to make risk calculations more precise.

• User activities (walking, shopping, talking)
• Phone location (pockets, out of pockets, in a room)
• RSSI
• Device model
• Percentage of infected users
• Total amount of users

What do you think? Expert opinions are highly appreciated.

[assert-not-singularity]

Checking if someone is talking is very critical in my opinion: This should require the app to have access to the microphone and could make the app less trustworthy to a major part of the user base. If we are communicating that we only collect anonymized IDs via Bluetooth, why do we need access to the microphone?

[haveyaseen]

There isn't necessarily a need for microphone access, and I would assume that determining if someone is talking is an entire project itself.

I've been thinking about it a little and I think the user should set this metadata themselves and later send the collected to the server, together with a few random values. This could even be part of the live app when using differential privacy (algorithms like RAPPOR, Encode-Shuffle-Analyze) to randomize the relevant fields.

[joernb]

Just some technical thoughts about how to integrate those capabilities into the codebase:

A key question is, wether or not additional measuring capabilities should all become part of the public app or if there will be different versions for different audiences (e.g. a closed testing audience). If there will be different versions, maybe those capabilities can be implemented using build-time feature toggles. Environment variables during the build process could switch certain features on or off. That would allow to build different versions of the app with different capabilities including a version with enhanced measuring for a closed test audience for example. A transparent/public build and deploy pipeline could show the feature toggles used during the build. The feature toggles could be documented (e.g. regarding their potential affection of privacy) to address concerns.