Re: Privacy-protecting contact tracer for COVID-19?

But, Michael, Paola, that is exactly what we are trying to prevent.

We are not trying to invent personal tracking. Google already tracks all of us. We are trying to change the way we are being tracked to avoid all the concerns that you raised. I think we share the same concerns.

For example - here is the map with the dots of Israel: https://imoh.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=66b5c304a3114df89ef5cfc8e8b12eb2&locale=he&

It raises all the concerns you raised here. It is centralized, governed by the government. It exposes privacy, not of Corona carriers, but worse - anyone who the government decided that has higher probability of being a carrier (higher than average).

So we ask - can we do better?

Ouri.

Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36>
________________________________
From: Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2020 12:23:12 PM
To: MXS Insights <mxsinsights@gmail.com>
Cc: Ouri Poupko <ouri.poupko@weizmann.ac.il>; W3C Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Privacy-protecting contact tracer for COVID-19?

I agree MIchel
and resonates with some of my thoughts
Some of the suggestions I saw here are cool but way too complicated-
and yes, the twisting is my concern'
twisting my angry people, twisting also by deviated institutions, twisted by
secret state mobs twisting by corrupt politicians. How would you define the problem and go about addressing  it
I cannot think of much at the moment, so far I consider the problem of humanity
not having fully evolved and starting to decline as intractable
PDM

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 5:00 PM MXS Insights <mxsinsights@gmail.com<mailto:mxsinsights@gmail.com>> wrote:
I hope my comments won’t be taken out of context here, but a concern that has been growing for me is that we are looking at this problem primarily through the lens of technology and missing the extremely important social and emotional dimensions.  I believe this is a very dangerous mistake.

I understand the desire to solve a truly difficult technical challenge (and it is clear that all have put real thought into it), but I believe these other dimensions must be of equal, or perhaps even greater, weight of that than the technical problem.

What happens when someone(s) use a system as outline here, to go out to find and remove the ‘problem’ (a la the individual in Missouri who was going to blow up a hospital)?  Will the people who are  now spitting on police officers use this information to go and beat up the infected? Do people who have have/had the virus (or any other attribute that the system can track) become social pariahs?  Would parents move their children away from all the ‘dots’ on the map?

If we can’t solve the social and behavioral problems that this kind of capability exposes, may be this technical problem should be left alone.  Are we inadvertently creating a problem bigger than the problem we are trying to solve?

I can’t get Christopher Allens recent email about the Dutch Archive out of my mind, what was started as a great good was taken and twisted to great evil.  In our current global situation where it appears democracy is under threat, and populism and nationalism is on the rise, not factoring in societies baser characteristics whether into any solution is foolhardy at best, and gross negligence at worst.

With greatest respect to you all,

Michael Shea.



On Mar 28, 2020, at 12:15 PM, Ouri Poupko <ouri.poupko@weizmann.ac.il<mailto:ouri.poupko@weizmann.ac.il>> wrote:

Here is a third approach:

1-      Everyone's path is recorded locally on their smartphone
2-      A public bulletin board (public ledger?) publishes the tracks of infected people in the following manner:
a.       Each track is divided into segments
b.       Each segment is represented as a 4d ball – just center and radius
c.       Each segment is signed with a different temporal DID, derived from the master DID of the patient
d.       Each ball is enlarged and offseted by a random displacement (as they do in differential privacy)
3-      When my smartphone finds that my path intersects with one of the segments, it requests a peer-to-peer anonymous communication with the owner of the segment.
4-      In the peer-to-peer communication both sides break their segment into smaller segments as in step 2 (sub step c is redundant) and communicate the scrambled sub-segments with each other. They do this iteratively for any overlapping sub-segments, until they get an intersecting point (2m radius) between their true paths.

Ouri.