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

Hi Michael, et alia,

I'm totally with you on this, in terms of the social and emotional 
dimensions. We are developing very realistic use cases based on things 
like detecting anti-social non-compliant spreaders and the impact of 
vaccine protesters/conspiracy theorists. My favorite use case is "the 
mistress situation" - about a fellow who sneaks out to visit his 
mistress - how do we get him to /want/ to comply with a contact tracing 
app, and not turn off the phone exactly when he's doing something risky? 
I believe that this is possible only by providing greater privacy, just 
like they do with HIV tests.

Further, my belief is that due to how flatfooted the federal response 
has been, and because local governmental bodies have been forced to be 
more proactive, it might be possible to deploy a pilot application with 
innovative features in a small to medium sized city. With a successful 
test, it may be possible to get a seat at the table when the CDC decides 
what technologies to integrate for a national solution. But more likely, 
this is a rare opportunity to launch a bottom up effort that drives the 
SSI vision at a grass roots level. Otherwise, we will certainly deploy a 
monolithic centralized database that could be later mis-used, just as 
Christopher says. I mean, Trump is already threatening not to comply 
with oversight for the $500B meant for SMEs.

And to be frank, I agree that DID's aren't ready for prime time stress 
testing, but we /can/ set the stage for privacy protecting contact 
tracing solutions later - and possibly embed a first pass at some sort 
of "the perfect should not be the enemy of the good" privacy protection 
into an early Phase I pilot test - and have that open source model 
reusable, to inform developers around the world. For example, let's 
think about how to create a DID based ID module that allows users to 
travel to other countries and make it easier to sign up for their 
contact tracers, and connect systems/data in an innovative new way. Or 
maybe it's possible that a VC for coronavirus antibody certificates 
could lead to the kind of /in vivo/ data collection that will help 
determine how long the antibodies last faster, so we embed that into a 
Phase II solution that combines that with core contact tracing for both 
infection and reinfection. Otherwise, once someone recovers and gets a 
paper certificate, they might simply stop using the contact tracing 
tool. Technologies like Kinsa show that innovative approaches work and 
that the CDC needs to catch up - we cannot allow the Federal government 
to reject anything new as "too difficult during a crisis".

Anyway, there are so many political roadblocks here, that we shouldn't 
create more here. I'll participate in the call on Tuesday, but honestly, 
I would prefer to recruit a small and more nimble team of architects and 
prolific developers to work offline in this likely quixotic initiative. 
For example, we have some very promising large scale optimization 
solutions, and we've recruited a brain trust of 20 top optimization 
scientists and PhDs - half of whom are full professors - to participate 
in our project. I'm hoping to do the same thing here, so...

    *EMAIL ME directly
    <mailto:moses.ma@futurelabconsulting.com?Subject=About%20your%20COVID%20initiative&Body=Please%20sign%20me%20up%2C%20I%20want%20to%20make%20a%20difference%21>
    if you'd like to join our small and nimble team, and please include
    your CV*

In other words, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would prefer 
not to "write a paper" for RWOT this time - instead I wish to move into 
action based on a collaboration model of 0% bloviating/100% cohesive 
action - to develop an MVP featuring something realistic running ASAP. 
Even if there's no DID in Phase I.

Oops, I guess I'm bloviating now... ;-)

Finally, you might ask "what the hell does Moses know about pandemics?" 
I was a strategic consultant for UNICEF in dealing with the re-outbreak 
of polio several years ago - and we participated in the successful 
effort to control outbreaks in Pakistan and Somalia - and one of our 
solutions was nominated for an "Innovation of the Year" award. As part 
of this assignment, my team spent time on the ground in Rawalpindi and 
Somalia, which are really dangerous places! (You never feel more alive 
than when someone you just met the day before gets kidnapped by the 
Taliban.) And confidentially, I've been working with a team of leading 
virologists (their lab was the first to sequence SARS) for a couple of 
years now, and have written a paper with them about using blockchains 
and SSI in outbreak research. Our paper has cleared peer review at 
/Science/, the AAAS journal, and is in the publication queue now. I 
believe this will be the first mention of DIDs in /Science/.

By the way, you might find this amusing... I've asked a couple of 
Hollywood producer friends (one exec produced /Home Alone/ and 
discovered Julia Roberts) if it might be possible for them to get us 100 
celebrities to do PSAs to support adoption for our pilot. It's 
non-technological stuff like this that can make a difference.

Finally, it's important to note that we have some running code already, 
and hope to have something decent to test in a month./But our rushing 
does not mean we are a technology solution blind to extremely important 
social and emotional dimensions.
/

Stay healthy everyone!

Moses
////




On 3/29/20 1:58 AM, MXS Insights 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.
>

-- 

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