When we give up a little bit of privacy in favor of security, we rarely gain that privacy back.
In the wake of 9/11 we got the Patriot Act, which is the largest expansion of our financial surveillance regime
since the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970. We don't want to end up looking like mainland China looks.
With lockdowns still in effect across the country Americans are growing restless.
They've taken something and blown it so far out of poroportion, that it's destroying our country.
There's a system that could make reopening possible without increasing the spread of COVID-19.
It's called contact tracing, and involves tracking down every in-person interaction
that infected individuals have had in the preceding days, and then testing, isolating, and repeating the process.
Several countries are using phone applications that use Bluetooth or GPS to generate a record
of who individuals have come into contact with. In Singapore downloading contact tracing apps
is voluntary. China and Israel use them to enforce mandatory quarantines and isolation.
Voluntary coronavirus tracing and tracking software for iPhones and Androids.
In the US Apple and Google have partnered to create a contact tracking app for iPhones and Android devices,
but these technologies are raising serious privacy concerns. It's important that these systems are
lawful and voluntary. It's important that these systems minimize, to the greatest extent possible,
the collection of personal information. Alan Butler is a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
which has been urging Congress to build privacy protections into any contact tracing system
deployed in the United States. Butler says it's also vital that the system be entirely voluntary.
Wouldn't making it voluntary limit the amount of data able to be collected and therefore undermine
the effectiveness of the system? I think it's likely that a decent percentage of citizens
may decide to install that app because if it's actually useful then they may find it helpful themselves.
But it won't—there will never be universal coverage for this type of system
I think, and it's and it's never meant to be, right? It's not a silver bullet. Butler says, like in other countries,
these apps would be used in conjunction with manual data collection, and he cautions against
systems deploying any apps that use GPS to track phones like those being used in China and Israel.
That really changes the relationship between the government and the citizen it's very different to build
a system you know for citizens to receive alerts that actually serve a
purpose to them and serve a public health purpose versus you know a system
of of you know direct government enforcement of quarantine orders and
like Butler says that a better approach is to use a phone's Bluetooth signal to
enable virtual handshakes and those handshakes don't reveal your
name to the other phone or the other phone's owner's name to you they just
exchange random and and and rapidly changing identifying numbers what is
Bitcoin bitcoin is the world's first crypto currency Peter Van Valkenburg
is the director of research at coin Center a nonprofit advocacy group for
cryptocurrency and decentralized computing technologies he praises
aspects of singapore's Bluetooth based traced together app which alerts users
when they've been in proximity to someone who's recently tested positive
for kovat 19 without revealing that person's identity but he objects to
Singapore's decision to store phone numbers in a central database we're not
talking about a system that's truly privacy preserving because there's still
this very valuable list of phone numbers that have been near other phone numbers
mm-hmm you could mine that data and if you were
sort of malicious and dedicated you could come up with just about as
accurate a portrait of a person's movement throughout their day and all
the people they've been in contact with as you have from the GPS data but
valkenburg says that cryptocurrency developers with their expertise in
building privacy-preserving systems could solve that problem he cites a
recent paper from the Z cash foundation where Van Valkenburg is a board member
that describes an anonymous and decentralized system for verifying Cova
19 test results what's important about that is unless you are found to be sick
and you publish your numbers to the server no information gets published to
the central server about you and so that's how we keep it private and local
the data is not shared at all unless and in the event that you are sick he says
another application of this technology could be in issuing proof of immunity
certificates for individuals who've developed antibodies that protect them
from Koga 19 this little QR code is a lot more powerful than it looks
it helps collect data about your travel history health status and more and China
is using it to track citizens and stop those infected with the corona virus in
this scenario health officials would grant digital
tokens of immunity to qualified individuals who would then be allowed to
engage in otherwise restricted activities like going to restaurants
driving taxis and walking around without a mask so the normal way of doing
digital identity is to just have a big list the decentralized ledger would not
include any personal identifiable information it would just be these
pseudonyms that's in a nutshell how Bitcoin works we have this database of
who owns which bitcoins but it's not one company that controls it
it's a blockchain that's shared across many people and it doesn't reveal a lot
of personal information because everyone on that database is pseudonymous if we
were to build a decentralized proof of immunity credentialing system I would
hope that it would at least contemplate using a decentralized identity system
rather than trusting one corporation or one government to keep this centralized
database which could be vulnerable to hacking or to abuse but truly private
and decentralized systems are harder to build and it's not clear what Van
Valkenburg envisions could be ready in the near
term perhaps the system being developed by Apple and Google will have to be good
enough though the companies didn't respond to our interview requests
according to the initial proposal their system does rely on Bluetooth handshakes
as opposed to GPS to preserve location privacy the phone identifiers recycle
daily and never leave the device unless the user reports a positive case and the
whole system is completely voluntary with users deciding whether to
contribute to contact tracing Apple and Google software would maintain
a central record with identifying information from phones of those who
test positive but it would stop there keeping those who were merely exposed
anonymous even allowing devices to identify each other through Bluetooth is
a step towards weaker security that in the past companies wouldn't consider
Google with Android and Apple with iOS have previously prevented apps from
doing this kind of Bluetooth handshaking for the very reason that it is extremely
violative of people's privacy so in order to allow these apps to work Apple
and Google need to loosen the restrictive policies on apps ability to
use bluetooth for these purposes and what's interesting which is indicative
maybe of whether Google and Apple are approaching this in a way that respects
our privacy is that they've refused to loosen some of the ability of apps to
access location data when health authorities in some countries have
demanded it how much of a concern is it for you that once we allow this
temporary surveillance it's not going to remain so temporary when we give up a
little bit of privacy in favor of security or to address a crisis we
rarely gain that privacy back in the wake of 9/11 we got the Patriot Act the
largest expansion of our financial surveillance regime since the Bank
Secrecy Act in 1970 and we may now see that rather than in the Terrorism
context in the pandemic context and instead of talking about financial
surveillance we're talking about full on location surveillance we don't want to
end up looking like mainland China looks right now we're sure we might be able to
lock down a city during a pandemic and you might think that the trade-off is
worth it then but it's important to note they also have the ability to track
ethnic minorities and put them in reeducation camps when they don't go to
the right places and so I think it's a noble objective to say can we do
something to stop the spread of the disease but not involve a violation of
people's privacy but that doesn't mean that we must do this maybe if it turns
out that we can't build a solution that minimizes those privacy risks
we just shouldn't have this we should just say look there are other ways to
fight pandemic as states begin to contemplate plans to end to lock down
the Apple Google project is set for release in mid-may the onus is on all of
us to make sure to scrutinize the systems that are put into place the
proposals that are put forward and to make sure that they are protective of
privacy and that we don't you know adopt some you know new eternal system of
Perpetual surveil and so they none of us want to live in that world
you