During the height of COVID, I was exploring the API design of the top-selling COVID tests on Amazon. Several had wildly unsecured APIs—sequential patient IDs but the results endpoint assumed knowing the “secret” patient ID counted as auth. Or just completely open GraphQL implementations, no different than a password-less db…
For anyone considering DIYing a diagnostics program, don’t. But I’m biased (I’m the founder of a YC-backed diagnostics as a service co: https://spotdx.com)
I was working for the NL government on COVID stuff and the only thing I can say is that it's a shame I'm under NDA. It changed my view of the tech industry and I feel silly for calling colleagues in the past out for what I consider inadequate practices. As all were far above the mean.
Weren’t CoronaCheck and CoronaMelder open source? I would have assumed plenty of people would audit them, but I don’t recall seeing any negative news (jokes on their availability aside)
It's not necessarily a problem, you just have to be sensible about security practices. To be clear, at-home tests mean you collect the sample at home and then mail them in, not the test is run at home. (disclaimer, I work at Spot)
-> ""The exposed certificates and other documents were all marked with the name and logo of Coronalab.eu. Although the website appears to be offline, Coronalab is owned by Microbe & Lab, an ISO-certified laboratory based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. According to the NL Times, “CoronaLab is one of the two largest commercial test providers in the Netherlands”.""
1. Consider the pandemic response an international hysteria specifically engineered by the global elite to move as much real value up the socioeconomic ladder as possible.
2. Don’t consider the Dutch to be any different.
3. Bingo. The Dutch fit into the diatribe.
I don’t understand why you think this would somehow be difficult to contend with.
tongue in cheek reference but based in a flawed but pervasive understanding of that event
government modification of derivatives contracts, war right beyond the border (affecting delivery of supply), total gaps in price discovery possibly due to plague... this is probably one of the worst examples of anything irrational, despite being the poster child
You'd prefer to just move on without mentioning or discussing the mass hysteria we all saw happen? People were literally locked in camps and we're supposed to just forget about it?
I don't care if it takes 5, 10 or 20 years. Heads have to roll. We were lied to and ridiculed by the people that are supposed to protect us, and they're getting away with it.
I focus on what I can control and use people in power as instruction manuals for alpha when things line up for me or my network
If I can scare the legislature to pass all my riders in a 1,000 page bill nobody read, I absolutely will. I probably won't care what the pretext was, just that consensus to get something passed is possible for once in a decade, after everything I wanted died in committee the last 5 sessions.
There wasn't enough "hysteria" (that is to say, rational precautions being taken) in my mind. Medical personnel are still so jaded from their experience that we get periodic articles about people quitting the field from burnout.
> People were literally locked in camps
China does this all the time for a variety of purposes. I really haven't heard about other countries doing this, have you?
> I really haven't heard about other countries doing this, have you?
Australia had a manhunt over 3 teenagers who escaped the quarantine camp which made international news. I think it even made the front page here. There were plenty of videos from those places back then, you should look at them very scary stuff. Over what is essentially a flu, which we knew from the data at the time. Why don't we take the same precautions with the flu? Kills as much, and the same people, what gives?
I also remember CNN not touching the lab-leak "because Trump" and with a straight face they claim it's his fault they're not doing their jobs and getting to the truth.
I remember press conferences telling vaccinated people not to hug their unvaccinated loved ones. Why not when it's 100%, 95%, 90%, kind of%, maybe% effective?
Nothing rational about it, and there's a reason it just disappeared almost overnight. Just POFF and it was gone, no longer an issue. Let's move on, Ukraine is at war now. Oh right sorry, the spring-, summer-, no counteroffensive didn't go as planned. Now Israel, Israel is what we care about. We always wanted a peace treaty in Ukraine. It's good that we split up Ukraine between Russia, Romania and Hungary, now NATOs borders are expanding, which was always the goal.
> Australia had a manhunt over 3 teenagers who escaped the quarantine camp which made international news.
Thanks, I didn't hear about that.
> Over what is essentially a flu, which we knew from the data at the time.
Maybe 1000 people had prior exposure to a SARS clade coranavirus. And if you think they are essentially the same you certainly haven't been reading the news and analysis that I have.
In the US, over the last 30 years approximately the same number of people have died "with" COVID as have died "with" the flu. COVID's only been around 1/10th the time.
> I also remember CNN not touching the lab-leak "because Trump" and with a straight face they claim it's his fault they're not doing their jobs and getting to the truth.
Yes, CNN is biased up the wazoo. But at that point it rationally didn't matter the cause, but nipping this in the bud the best we could. The cause, and even lists of potential causes, are important to prevent future patient zeroes. And given all of the crap that's happened with wildlife to human transmission in the past (SARS 1, MERS, metapneumovirus, bird flu, swine flu, mpox, hemorrhagic viruses) there are other important avenues of transmission to deal with in addition to safe laboratory and sample collection practices.
> I remember press conferences telling vaccinated people not to hug their unvaccinated loved ones. Why not when it's 100%, 95%, 90%, kind of%, maybe% effective?
Injected vaccination (getting a shot into your muscle) was only really going to help with duration of symptoms (potentially shutting COVID down when it's just the sniffles, if you're lucky). It's much worse at preventing transmission than mucosal vaccination is. If you want to protect others, wear a mask. If you want to protect yourself, a quality mask is better, but a vaccine is okay.
> and there's a reason it just disappeared almost overnight.
Yeah, I was really pissed when the California government dropped both masking and social distancing at the same time, just in time for Delta to hit, once the first vaccines had been out for ~ 3 months.
I'm also pissed at the wishy-washyness of talking heads when asked whether masks are recommended again around the holiday season. Well fitting and well used masks are superior to vaccination. If you're willing to use them, then use them! If you're only willing to use them when someone else says it's a good idea...I just really don't get it.
> Australia had a manhunt over 3 teenagers who escaped the quarantine camp
Various Australian states isolated from each other, Australia as a whole isolated from the world - anybody that chose to travel across the international borders or across the particular state borders knew in advance they would have to isolate for 10 to 14 days.
The vast majority of Australian citizens had no issue with isolation and saw it as neccesary to prevent worse outbreaks (which it did) a large proportion of isolation was self isolation at home, or in hotels.
"The quarentine camp" wasn't where three teenagers "escaped from" (where "escape" == left when they shouldn't have (no evading armed guards after scaling barbed wire topped walls with search lights)) it was a facility set up as an airlock for international travel - dongas (transportables) in the outback and despite looking a bit grim was entirely comfortable for anyone used to FiFo (Fly In | Fly Out) work (ie. many Australians) - I stayed there twice having chosen to travel overseas for work.
There were a lot of youtube | social media supercuts of horrific conditions in Australia put together by people that didn't like the measures taken - these were pretty much all highly selective presentations with tight shots of relatively small groups of protesters and some Olympic level whinging.
I see you're trying to downplay the situation, but these teens literally had to climb the barbed wire fence that surrounded the camp. According to this article[1] they even tested negative the day before, yet couldn't leave.
If I recall the situation correctly they weren't traveling, but Aboriginals with no means to self-isolate from their families so they were taken into quarantine.
Your efforts to downplay this is what is so extremely scary about humans today. Before covid I thought another Hitler (yes I went there) was impossible, but now that I've seen how quickly people turn on each other and shut off their brains I'm not so sure. It taught me a lot about fascism for "the greater good" and how otherwise reasonable and sane people turn bat-shit insane with enough fearmongering.
There have been plenty of people who, proportionate to what they could do, were worse than Hitler. Whenever a group of people assert that their rights can only come about through the policing of another group of people you face this possibility.
I'm surprised you didn't come to this conclusion beforehand given the large history of people being retained in custody or prison despite being innocent or the state otherwise not having the right to detain them.
False negative tests do exist. But yes, power differentials of any sort do easily lead to 'letter of the law' situations.
My point is not about the individual, it's about the average Jane and Joes putting them in charge and asking them to commit atrocities. I used to have faith in humanity but I lost it in those years.
I spent the majority of "the COVID years" within Australia and overall relatively few people were held anywhere with barbed wire fencing, most people understood why quarentine periods were required to stop the spread of infection despite which there were multiple instances of little pockets here and there of people that either didn't understand or were determined to break quarantine for whatever reason.
An isolation period is exactly that - a period of time in which checks are made to ensure there is no infection.
These particular teens that you linked to could have waited a few days and walked out or broken quareantine - they chose to break quarentine.
( At this point there's a massive essay to insert on the clumsy handling by NT authorities of most things indigenous and the perspective on jail held by local communities - this was never going to end well without the kind of support that anybody local to NT | outback Australia can be sure wasn't provided https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubxZsfyEwWY )
Your comments about Hilter and facism are more than a bit Over The Top .. you might recall that Buchenwald did not have a 14 day waiting period for release.
Maybe back off with the bat-shit insane fearmongering?
A couple of tents is a camp. More so if there's a fire and a bit of a sing a long.
The implication being pressed in social media by anti-vaxxers was that it was equivilent to a Boer War internment camp, a German work camp, a Nazi death camp, etc.
> In the US, over the last 30 years approximately the same number of people have died "with" COVID as have died "with" the flu. COVID's only been around 1/10th the time.
I don't know about the US numbers, you have a bigger obesity problem and might've had more deaths. But where I'm from one flu season a few years before 2020 was worse and deadlier than any of the years with covid. Here an overwhelming amount of the deaths were people 85 and above, those below are almost a rounding error. Same as the flu.
> Yes, CNN is biased up the wazoo. But at that point it rationally didn't matter the cause, but nipping this in the bud the best we could. The cause, and even lists of potential causes, are important to prevent future patient zeroes.
But it did matter, us so-called conspiracy theorists knew everything about Fauci, Daszak and the Wuhan gain-of-function research from the beginning. We were screaming our lungs out for people to listen but were ridiculed, and WE were blamed for the spread because we knew the vaccine wouldn't prevent transmission and was useless for most people below 50-60.
Given how many people and agencies knew from recent news I wonder how they all kept quiet. How is it even possible if the western countries are democracies? I want indictments and jail time, but I'm not holding my breath. Psychopaths run the world.
Are you from Australia, or any other place that was able to successfully quarantine against COVID for an extended period of time? Even so I'd like to know so that I can look at the data.
An important point from that link comparing the two is that if you get hospitalized with COVID your death rate is close to twice that compared to if you get hospitalized with the flu.
And I don't see how mentioning obesity rates matters. If COVID is effectively the flu then obesity should effectively matter the same for both of them.
If you don't live in the US I don't understand why you're focusing on the US.
>and WE were blamed for the spread because we knew the vaccine wouldn't prevent transmission and was useless for most people below 50-60.
AGAIN Masking and distancing mattered, and still matters. Regardless whether one got the vaccine. I know those aholes at CNN and the like were saying that only the vaccines mattered. From my point of view, as a person who wanted to shut down this viral attack against the entire human species, a pox on both your houses.
We'd actually know better if China, not the US, but China, had been more forthcoming as to what exactly happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology . Do we blame the people who hire contractors for the contractors' screwups, or the contractors who had stated (through BSL-4 certification) that they were competent to do the job?
Gain of function research is one thing, but it's not definitive evidence that the virus leaked from the WIV. As I discussed in this thread almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34753613
I live in Sweden. We had very little quarantine, other than WFH. Vaccine passes existed but was up to organizers to decide. Our problem is our culture of conformity, we even have a word for it The Law of Jante[1]. This is why we were able to be so lax, because people generally just follow rules and very rarely questions authority. Our people are predisposed to make eachother conform so there's no need for a police state.
I do not focus on the US, the issue was international which only makes it scarier to consider the scale of it. But it was a US program, to do research illegal in the US, and I mainly blame Fauci and Daszak. Daszak was in the team the WHO sent to investigate the lab leak and even mentioned his conflict of interest in an interview before.
While all this was public data, the lab leak was ridiculed, by who? The people who had everything to lose if it was public. Then we're supposed to get the vaccines these same people push on us for the virus they modified to transmit to humans. Yeah fuck off with that bullshit.
And there was 0 discussion about this. We were called crazy, evil and all kinds of words. We were dehumanized, just because we wanted a sane discussion. I'm still waiting for an honest port-mortem of those years.
Don't try to blame China, they're a dictatorship acting like expected. We (as in the west) had people funding and performing the research in charge of our responses. Fauci smirking behind Trump on press conferences disgusts me.
> Our problem is our culture of conformity, we even have a word for it The Law of Jante[1]
I think in Australia this is known as cutting down the tall poppies. The presence of this effect in Scandinavia and Anglo-Oceania, places commonly thought of as egalitarian, makes me wonder whether this effect is in any way related to the observation that they have higher gender role self-segregation (particularly Scandinavia) than do less gender-equal countries.
> But it was a US program, to do research illegal in the US,
NIH funding of gain of function research was only banned from October 2014 - December 2017 by NIH moratorium [1], and might only now be in the process of getting a more general ban [2].
> And there was 0 discussion about this. We were called crazy, evil and all kinds of words. We were dehumanized, just because we wanted a sane discussion.
I agree. Ad hominems make really easy soundbites, and both the left and right media have been using them for a while now.
> Don't try to blame China, they're a dictatorship acting like expected.
No. I'll blame them too. It's a choice that people make political cultures that preference scapegoating and reaction instead of forethought and the precautionary principle. *If* COVID did come from WIV, then they are to blame. They were under no particular existential pressure. Everyone working for WIV should have been trained in good technique. Protocols should have been in place to identify and inform on any accidental release. And if they played fast and loose with safety that's on them.
> Fauci smirking behind Trump on press conferences disgusts me.
People make odd faces or suddenly think of something inappropriate to the moment all the time.
But you don't, the only reason we're even discussing China now is because you brought it up as "but China!" when I want Fauci and Daszak to get consequences for keeping quiet and lying about what they knew early in the investigation.
Here are your exact words:
> We'd actually know better if China, not the US, but China, had been more forthcoming as to what exactly happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
You can think China is equally responsible, they are not mutually exclusive views, but it's not really a response to my statement is it? It's shifting the blame. Fauci and Daszak denied any possibility of a lab leak, and should be prosecuted. The cynic in me even assumes this was outsourced to VIW in an attempt to cover up their tracks if shit hit the fan, don't fall for it.
What did they know that was pertinent? That the NIH had funded some gain of function research at WIV? What does that have to do with dealing with a current coronavirus outbreak?
> Fauci and Daszak denied any possibility of a lab leak, and should be prosecuted.
For what? Giving their opinion? WIV was specializing in this research. For very good reasons given that China was the source of SARS-CoV-1, and has a host of other animal populations and animal-to-human transfer scenarios (e.g. the Wuhan market where live wildlife is kept in close contact with humans for consumption) that the US does not have. Why not hire them to do what they are better able to do than any US institution?
The calculated excess mortality rate per hundred thousand people was 50.5 for during this first COVID wave. You have to go back to the 1931 (presumably flu) outbreak to meet and exceed that death rate.
Which would yield an excess mortality worse than anything but the 1918/19 "Spanish flu" pandemic if considered just one outbreak. And on par with the 1889/92 "Russian flu" double wave pandemic. Though when counting the third wave of "Russian flu" it was probably proportionately more lethal than COVID has been (so far with ~5 Swedish waves).
: Comparison of HCoV-OC43 with the most closely related strain of Betacoronavirus 1 species, bovine coronavirus BCoV, indicated that they had a most recent common ancestor in the late 19th century, with several methods yielding most probable dates around 1890, leading authors to speculate that an introduction of the former strain to the human population might have caused the 1889–1890 pandemic, which at the time was attributed to influenza.[9] The COVID-19 pandemic brought further evidence of a link, as the 1889–1890 pandemic produced symptoms closer to those associated with COVID-19 (the infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 betacoronavirus) than to influenza.[10] Brüssow, in August 2021, referred to the evidence that OC43 caused the 1889–1890 outbreak as "indirect, albeit weak" and was "conjectural", yet the 1889 epidemic was the best historical record to make predictions about the current COVID-19 path due to the similar "clinical and epidemiological characteristics".[11]
I feel frequent data leaks, credit card number leaks, difficulty in un-subscribing or stopping payments after subscribing, etc... makes me appreciate and want to use consolidated sign in / subscription management / payment management options almost exclusively.
It's a bit like keeping money... You can stash it under your mattress, hoping you'll never suffer a burglary; or you can give it to a bank, and let them spend money on security and insurance.
This said, banks have specific fiduciary responsibilities and the above-mentioned insurance, which compensate for the big target they're painting on their own backs; whereas most tech services, even massive ones, tend to hide behind service agreements boiling down to "eh, if it happens it happens, nothing we can do, sucks to be you". Unless they're in healthcare, they're barely required to disclose whether they've been breached, let alone compensate us for the loss of privacy and increased risk of identity fraud that we endure.
Maybe it's time for the legislator to define "personal data providers" a bit more rigorously.
>and increased risk of identity fraud that we endure.
The problem is even worse than that. The whole framing of the issue of identity theft as a thing that happens to a person rather than a bank is problematic. That the bank issued credit in my name to someone other than me really should be entirely their problem, not one that probably messes up my life for years.
That doesn't do much to protect you against a website storing government mandated passport information. The only protection there would be if authorities stop demanding that everyone takes copies of personal IDs.
Yeah, when did that become acceptable?! I've had a bunch of sites request a photo or scan of my state-issued driver's license, like that's just OK to ask people to send to them.
Erroneously in my opinion. Verifying someone's identity does not require making a copy. Nor is a copy sufficient.
The one thing making a copy is supposed to achieve is prove that someone saw the original. But what's important is not what was on it, but who saw it, where and when and whether it was valid. This doesn't require knowing what exactly is on the document, and a mere copy achieves none of these.
What grinds my gears is idiots in the Dutch government who should know better and decided to write into law that a copy or transcript is sufficient proof. So now everyone is storing lots of sensitive information to prove something the information does not show.
I have no problem showing ID to my local bank though. They at most photocopy it and put it in a paper file, which maybe goes into Docstar or something. I don't trust $big_tech_site to actually a) do a good job securing it and b) not just sell the information to someone anyway.
It's silly. AT&T wanted it from me to add a phone on a business account that was shipping to our physical address, which has not ever changed since the account was opened. eBay wanted it (and my SSN! and my wife's!) despite our account being a business account registered with an EIN and connected to a business bank account. Instagram/Facebook/Meta/whatever wanted it to reactivate a dormant account that talked to a still-valid email address to which I had access.
> I have no problem showing ID to my local bank though
Me neither. But they normalized this behavior when moving to mobile apps for netbanks by requiring people to photograph their IDs and take selfies for KYC.
After all this KYC stuff, photographing personal documents became normal and then many other big tech companies started requiring this stuff. I think even Facebook started asking people to send pictures of IDs to verify accounts.
I know phone companies in EU started doing this.
I still refuse doing it for all these trivial services and it has a real cost in that it prevents me from using several services. At some point I will probably have to do it.
In my country, we recently had a real estate agency who got hacked and had all their KYC stuff exposed and sold for ID theft. It is a huge mess.
The company then reached out to all the persons that were affected by mail telling them that this happened and that they should contact them immediately.
So I contacted them. First step when contacting them was them requiring to prove my identity by sending photo of my personal ID again. Yeah, fool me once....
Not clear I guess, but I meant small claims for anyone facing the same issue. Over and over we get bullied by these big companies looking to solve their problems at the expense of the little guy. And have no recourse.
Is my passport information really that precious? It doesn’t contain much that isn’t on my birth certificate, apart from my ugly mug. And quite literally anyone can get an officially certified copy of my birth certificate, because that’s a matter of public record.
I have taken to using a single card in person, and a single card online. The Card on use online is also a Capital One account so I make use of their Eno service to make virtual cards for every vendor
If some company does not want to unsub me, I just turn off that virtual card.
It seems that anyone entrusted with private information will eventually be breached. I think that there should be legislation - strong legislation - that protects our society's individuals and their information. Make it an uncomfortable and costly responsibility to collect information, store it temporarily and long-term.
Additionally, connecting devices to the internet directly or indirectly should have the same sorts of responsibilities.
OK ladies and gentlemen, the news just dropped, privacy regarding medical data "absolutely doesn't matter", presumably because some people have it worse or something!
Is anyone actually surprised? Everything was thrown together in a huge hurry and governments were playing fast and loose with laws and regulations.
I'm making no judgement on whether that approach was a net positive or negative here, but the writing was on the wall from day 1 with regards to data security.
Why does it need to be logged and stored by a third party?
I'd not have a problem with an employer offering daily on-site testing with no persistent logging for people who have to be on-site but for whatever reason can't be vaccinated, or if they're having outbreak problems in the area.
If no one stored it, there would be nothing to get leaked when the eventuality of data breach happens. Storing it is not in the best interest of the person taking the test, is it? Doubly so for negative or inconclusive results.
Medical records are typically stored electronically so that, for example, doctors can refer back to your medical history (as can you). I'm not sure why COVID results would be unique in not being stored--and, in fact, seem like something that would be less sensitive than a lot of stored data.
And as per these records not being in the best interest of the person, knowledge of previous infection could be useful in diagnosis if, say, the person has long COVID and is unable to recite their medical history for some reason.
Admittedly, the results of COVID instant tests were not necessarily recorded anywhere--at least unless you made an appointment with your doctor after a positive result.
But I'm pretty sure that's not a reason to more or less uniquely exclude laboratory COVID tests from electronic record systems.
I was commenting w.r.t. employer-mandated tests of some/any sort. Things you might have to do as part of your going-to-work daily routine.
During the pandemic, I had a few customers who would take temperature when you arrived on-site, and put it in the paper contractor/visitor log. If they'd wanted me to submit the data to some third party and actually associate it with my and/or my business's name, I'd have had a problem with that. It wouldn't matter to me what procedure I was being asked to submit to.
I think I only once had to take a test to attend an event--and the company that handled the process claimed that records weren't kept. Of course, I had to submit proof of vaccination on many occasions including to my company.
I assume required testing was much more common in domains like healthcare.
That depends on how many people work in the particular area with the particular reader, and what their general patterns of arrival to work are, and what their general patterns of body temperature are.
From an absolute "can this be correlated?" perspective, sure. From a "is this data easily mine-able" or "if someone gets this data, will I care?" perspective, not so much.
I was commenting w.r.t. employer-mandated tests of some kind.
I don't know about other countries' situation, but here in the USA we have things like insurance companies at least considering the possibility of buying up data from things like 23andme and using that data to adjust your premiums.
Indeed, we seem to be OK with things being stored forever, bought and sold without oversight or consent, when they could've been on a local piece of paper or never written down at all.
Right, but you can do them as you come into work, visit a customer site as a contractor, whatever. Were any places that required a test for entry really requiring a lab test? If so, were they isolating the people whose test results were not in? If not, what's the point of testing?
There is a certain strain of discourse that goes "what? me politics?", getting upset when their obviously politically charged just-asking-questions narrative is called out as such. Concerning at best, antisocial at worst.
Everything is politics to someone. Him asking "Why are you downvoted" got flagged, how crazy is that?
Getting personal info leaked because one was coerced into taking a test is a completely valid discussion, without getting offended. This is the final days of civilization we're seeing, the idiocracy is here and there's no turning back.
Yeah I don't know how we're supposed to have good faith conversations about nontrivial issues if we as a society can't accept that sometimes valid arguments about an issue run counter to personal politics.
Because the covid outrage industry has gotten boring. It used to be about how we were going to be forced to stay home forever, then it was about how we'd be forced to wear masks forever, and now that that stuff didn't come to pass it's fizzling out as the people who still have a chip on their shoulder need to find some passive aggressive way to be outraged and oppressed.
Keep in mind that the experiences that people had during 2020, 2021, and 2022 differed a lot based on where they were located.
Across Canada as a whole, for example, there were a lot of harsh, extremely harmful, and blatantly stupid "public health" policies that were forced on the general public pretty much the entire time.
Quebec tended to be far more totalitarian about the restrictions than the other provinces, though. People in Quebec had to endure awful curfews, for example, while that generally wasn't the case elsewhere in the country.
Toronto forced masking months before it was forced across the entire province of Ontario.
The "unvaccinated" people, including those who were perfectly healthy the entire time, also faced significant discrimination and harm into late 2022, well after it was obvious that many people who'd taken numerous shots were still getting sick.
Also, a significant number of people lost jobs, lost their businesses, lost educational opportunities, were prevented from visiting with dying loved ones, were prevented from holding and/or attending funerals, and otherwise suffered other irreparable damage.
Maybe you lucked out and were in an area where the restrictions weren't too bad. That certainly wasn't the case for everybody, though. Lots of people went through prolonged and completely unnecessary suffering, and they will never forget how they were harmed.
Companies have little incentive to pick vendors that don't get other people's data stolen.
Imagine there are two vendors offering a service:
Vendor 1 costs $1 per unit of service, doesn't give a shit about security and will probably get hacked.
Vendor 2 costs $1.2 per unit of service because they care about security
Then if it's not your data that's about to be leaked, the "smart" (profitable) thing to do is to not look at the second part so you can pretend you didn't know, and pick vendor 1.
Generally, the use of the word 'coerced' involves threat of force, which approximately zero employers invoked. When you use it to describe conditions of employment, you're conflating violence with company policy. Most people at this point are going to infer that you have some kind of problem with the pandemic response, whether they agree with you or not. So, that's likely the dogwhistle being referred to here.
Meanwhile, if you are making a good-faith argument that employers have too much control over their employees' health care, feel free to get involved with organizing labor unions.
>Generally, the use of the word 'coerced' involves threat of force, which approximately zero employers invoked
Yes. Forcing someone to choose between losing their job or undergoing unusual and routine mandatory, invasive medical procedures, which can lead to consequences like those mentioned in the above article, constitutes coercion.
That's not the commonly-accepted interpretation of coercion. Under this definition, "forcing" someone to choose between losing their job and doing the work they were hired to do also constitutes coercion. Losing your job because you declined to comply with company policy does not constitute violence. Insisting that your modified definition is the correct one does not advance the discourse in a productive manner.
For anyone considering DIYing a diagnostics program, don’t. But I’m biased (I’m the founder of a YC-backed diagnostics as a service co: https://spotdx.com)