With the previous news from China of their authoritarian surveillance system being repurposed for epidemiological uses, and the US governments interest in the same, I have been mulling what other approaches could be taken. Those of us who care about and work in privacy-enhancing technology do not want this pandemic to become yet another moment for an acceleration of rights erosion on this front. Simultaneously, I understand that contact tracing of a contagious person is key to fighting any outbreak. Also, that being able to gain general insights into movement and distance between citizens in a country can also be very helpful.
To cut to the chase, I have some ideas, and I am hoping to find out who out there may be advocating for or working on this problem. We need to provide alternatives to the most obvious, least private solutions, and quick. To summarize my concept, Jonnie Penn and I have been working on a project (Spotlight![0]) aimed at allowing unionized workers to gather data about their work days, which includes very detailed geospatial data, movement history and more. In my testing, I can see my movement through the shopping isles at Trader Joe's, the hallways in my kids' school, and how long I spend in my kitchen vs my home office in a typical day. All of this data is securely stored on the user's device, until they choose to share it with an advocate. I believe the approach we are taking to provide insights into a worker's day could be helpful for public health applications, as well. My concept is that through use of technology like Bloom Filters[0] or Google's Private Join and Compute[1], a user could compare their own time+place data (essentially a set of hashes) to publicly released data of positive / contagious cases. You could both check for exact co-presence, as well as a before/after time range. If there was a match, then they alone would decide what to do. Ideally any system would tell them to self-isolate at the list, provide local testing options, and also ask them to share their anonymized data set of time+place hashes, to be added into the centrally stored aggregated mix of potential contract time+place hashes. I know there are researchers at BU working on civic applications for multi-party computation[3], and plan to reach out to them. Who else should I be talking to? Are Google, Apple, Facebook and others already thinking along these lines? They surely have the motherload of location data at this resolution, but again, as we have seen in previous cases with national security and law enforcement, these are tricky boxes to close once they are opened. Thanks for any thoughts, contacts or feedback. Take care, stay soapy, Nathan p.s. Shout-out to all of you home schooling parents out there. I mean I have had in-office interns and research assistants before, but usually they are a bit more qualified! :) [0] https://spotlightproject.gitlab.io/ [1] https://llimllib.github.io/bloomfilter-tutorial/ [2] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/06/helping-organizations-do-more-without-collecting-more-data.html [3] https://multiparty.org/ _______________________________________________ List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/guardian-dev To unsubscribe, email: [email protected]
