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

Ouri, et al

we can try to do better by increasing our awareness, and developing better
tracking systems

But I don''t think we can prevent abuse by governments and secret states
and spy agencies, nor prevent them to twist the good intentions of
developers

Secret states are powerful and can manipulate even privacy activists into
becoming their spies an perpetrate privacy abuse on their behalf, without
the privacy activist even understanding what they are doing.

They do so by saying that they trying to protect someone in some way from
breach of privacy/for their own safety but they do so by breaking privacy
and leveraging extra constitutional powers.

Legitimate governments would not know this is all going on. and the average
person
would even being able to contemplate cognitively this is happening.

Identity Privacy activists and technologists are then called to work for
the secre state and warrant the legitimacey of of the illegitimate act, and
by doing so an inextricable mess completely below legality is creating a
surveillance lock becomes the de facto state of affairs. We cannot prevent
this kind of perversion from taking place.

But we can try to stay out of it and leave the phone at home, and possibly
get rid of the phone altogether when we can get our wifi from the air
eventually
Regarding the app -   I have worked out a neat very simple design . very
simple
Is that still needed? Is there a formal way to share?

P


On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 6:01 PM 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.
>
>
>