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

Yes, we can do better by introducing self-sovereign communities as a layer
between self-sovereign individuals and the state.

My parent’s Holocaust experience in Romania was quite different from the
Dutch. One’s chance of being sent to a camp depended on the local community
and how it was governed.

Decentralized governance is enabled by SSI and, because contagion is a
local thing, applies. Decentralized governance is the essential innovation
on top of SSI that is implemented in the Trustee model (a COVID-19 thread
in the private-credentials list).

- Adrian



On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 6:04 AM Ouri Poupko <ouri.poupko@weizmann.ac.il>
wrote:

> 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>
> 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>
> 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.
>
>
>