 Hi everybody. This is Cara Swisher. I'm here with Audrey Tang and we're going to talk a lot about privacy. All this privacy stuff was great. I'm not actually Cara Swisher. I've forgotten what it's like to be at a great privacy conference because they usually just try to steal all your information. So that's a pleasure. So let's actually get into that because, you know, Audrey, we talked about six months ago, I think, right in the middle of it. And Taiwan Steel has managed to really excel at what's happening with the pandemic and the response to it. I just want to sort of get an update from when we spoke before because you were talking about all these different methodologies you were using. So I'd love you to sort of talk to me about what has worked and what hasn't worked to begin with, especially around privacy and also the protection of public health, which are sometimes across purposes. Nothing much have changed, which I guess is good news, right? We're still at around 10 COVID related deaths. There's basically no lockdowns for the entire COVID-19 period. And we counter the pandemic with no lockdown specifically because we made sure that everybody understood the basic public health measures, including physical distancing and access to the PPEs, especially mask. We, I think, talked a little bit about how the open source applications, hundreds of them, help people locating the mask availability. And now we're moving beyond just having masks available. People are now wearing mask as fashion items, I guess. But then we're still keeping the basic reproduction value of both the virus and also the infodamic and conspiracy theories at firmly below one. And so we're largely post-pandemic that haven't changed. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the privacy implications and some of the things you were doing. It wasn't even in lots of countries, including the United States, that was difficult. And it wasn't over privacy issues. It was, I don't know quite what it was over, the lack of use of masks, or just chuckle headness is what we call it in this country. But what, talk a little bit about the issues around privacy, how you dealt with them, because I think one of the things that's been remarkable is this idea of, as I said, sometimes public health and privacy feel like they're at cross purposes. So can you sort walk us through that? Sure. So we use what we call a participatory self-surveillance in terms of re-decentralizing. For example, the contact system for a local outbreak to be monitored. Of course, you have to go back and look at who frequented that particular place in the past 14 days. But if we centralize all the records that not only centralize the risk, but also makes the people who, in their lines of work, want to protect privacy, for example, people who are hostesses in the hostess bars in the nightlife district, they are the people that really would like to protect the identity and anonymity of their patrons. And so we actually did have a case last April when a hostess and a hostess bar initially didn't admit that she worked in that profession until the next day where she said, I have to protect my clients and so on. But instead of putting the nightlife district to jail or finding them for non-collaboration with the CCC, the Centripetal Command Center, we instead said that how about we co-create it from the first principle so that people can use throw away SIM cards or protocol mail accounts and so on and leave a contact without leaving a name on literally scratch pads when entering such businesses so that after four weeks with no local outbreak they can literally shred it and at no time do those information need to be aggregated or collected to the Central Epidemic Command Center. Unless, of course, an outbreak happens and that enabled the nightlife districts to essentially reopen in May and that enabled Taiwan to avoid the situation in other jurisdictions where those like the US prohibition era, this business has driven underground became the hazards to the pandemic. So talk about this self-surveillance, this concept. I think it's, you know, the word surveillance terrifies a lot of people in privacy and in general it's sort of a malevolent word or use malevolence. So explain to the concept of self-surveillance. Sure. So there's this term called sous-veillance, I think, Steve Mann term that talks about how ordinary citizens armed with wearable cams, right, which was very fashionable when Steve Mann first started wearing it but now everybody has a phone and who could actually provide the kind of information that's needed to keep, for example, the public institutions accountable or to in our case to make sure that the contact tracing still works. But because this surveillance is not a oversight, it's an underside in the time that people participating in it understand exactly what they're doing and the incentives are aligned so that the people who visit the Knowledge District, those businesses and the workers, they are both aligned in their incentive in keeping each other healthy but not revealing each other's full identity to the wider community. And so this kind of self-surveillance in a participatory fashion enables the kind of public health measures that could go to the places where traditional top-down measures could not. So talk about the idea of top-down measures because the idea of doing it yourself is not caught on elsewhere or it has caught on some places. So what does it take to create a feeling where you're self-surveying and having your privacy protected at the same time? I think one of the main thing is that there needs to be a comprehensive communication platform or mimetic engineering that talks about the rational self-interest of participating in such measures. For example, when we talk about wearing masks, we didn't say where to protect the elderly. We didn't say where to respect the frontline health workers, which are all true, but it doesn't appeal to rational self-interest. Rather, we say wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands. And this not only links, hence the notation with Mark's use, but it actually is a viral meme that actually spreads because people are interested in protecting themselves against their own unwashed hands. And so that makes sure that everybody could share this message, to remix this message. And so it becomes truly grassroots. So the grassroots in that you're saying this is about you, this is about selfishness like you're going to protect. One of the things you said when we talked before was when people, where was it here? I have to find it. There was a really good quote. The best idea is the ones that take in most people's feelings, and then we turn that into a regulation. That's right. Yes. So it's by responding to what people feel is as important in the here and there by responding in something that everyone can use. So that's empowerment, right? Because they can turn the technology, in this case, mask and soap are useful chemical and physical vaccine technologies and repurpose this communication in a way that their community understands. And mask dispense, for example, is run by the community pharmacists who already have the trust of the local elderly people. So that the people do not have to learn another like digital apparatus or to download this NFC enabled app or anything like that. They can continue to whatever they were already doing, interacting with the people they already trust just with this extra communication about public health. Is there something different about the people in Taiwan as opposed to anywhere else where this didn't work? It wasn't tried, I guess, is the point you're making? Yeah. Everyone above 30 years old in Taiwan remember how badly we managed SARS in 2003, which COVID is technically SARS-NCOV2, so SARS 2.0, right? So when SARS 1.0 hit Taiwan in 2003, we had exactly the same chaotic communications. People were panic-buying all sorts of different things. We had to lock down the entire hospital unannounced. It was very, very chaotic. So I think the main difference is just that in 2004, we learned from that memory when the trauma was too fresh and institutionalized the kind of response that I was just sharing into not just our laws, but also our yearly drills and so on. And you called it that your model of government tech, at least, is founded on radical trust and transparency from the government to the people. It's about trusting the people from the government. The people may not trust the government. Maybe that's the better, but the career public service really need to trust the citizens. And don't, is your feeling or that you, what do you mean by that the citizens have to trust the government or the government? The government need to trust the citizens in the sense of trusting that the participatory measures are going to be carried out by people who care about their own health and other neighbor's health, right? About trusting the citizens to use this real-time open data, open API of mask availability for good and not for abuse, right? And trusting the citizens to come up with social innovations, for example, about using traditional rice cookers to kill the virus and not kill the mask, which is essentially outside of its design purpose, but it's appropriate for the day, right? And so all this is about social innovation that's initiated by the social sector. And this is what I mean by trusting the citizens to come up with the measures. And if you impose the top-down measures like lockdown and so on, then of course it decimates like literally cut by 10% people's free agencies for each measure. Right. So you're cutting their free agency in that it's been top-down and they just are told what to do and therefore resist it. Exactly. All right. So talk a little bit of the specifics of some of the things that you think worked better and stuff that didn't work as well. So you had the hotel, the hotel stays. That again was an area where privacy was a big issue and what people are doing. Talk a little bit about how you initiated that and what you think you changed and did better over time, what didn't work initially. Sure. There's a heuristic that we do not invent new data collection points during the pandemic. This is both out of necessity of the legal arrangement because we never declare a state of emergency. So everything we do must be pre-approved by the legislature and also because people understand the cybersecurity and privacy parameters of existing measures more. So it's less likely to result into abuse if we reuse existing data collection points. So for example, yes. This is a concept of don't take, there's an expression in the United States that there's not crisis is always an opportunity. In this case it's not a data opportunity. No, it's not because when you develop a Greenfield code from scratch it's very unlikely that you will understand the full cybersecurity and privacy implications even for US teams and especially coding under pressure. But if we say hey when you're returning to Taiwan you have to stay in your own residence or in a quarantine hotel for 14 days and we're not going to ask you to install an app but your SIM card, your phone number will be packed in the telecoms and they're not going to send it to certified processors. They're going to use exactly the same mechanism that they notify you in advance of the earthquakes or the flood evacuation warnings and so on based on triangulation. So it doesn't know which room you're in. It can't interface with your email or WhatsApp but it does know to roughly 50 meter radius that you're breaking out of the quarantine in which an automatic SMS is first sent to your phone and then to the local health offices and if they check on you and you're not there then SMS is sent to the police officers but that is applied with equity and everybody understands that basically it all gets deleted after four weeks. So the whole point is that if people understand what's already going on then the privacy boundaries and measures are upheld by the people because everybody feels it's proportional but if it's new code whether it's proportional or not it's a matter of great debate. Meaning that it doesn't get to the certain people are affected and others are not. Exactly. So in terms of any mistakes you made in doing that was there something that you had to correct was there was there something that didn't work? Yeah a simple thing is that in the very beginning like early February last year we had to basically improvise a lot of ways to ramp up our mass production in a country of 23 million. We originally had less than 2 million a day production for a medical grade mask and we eventually improved the production to more than 20 million a day by it takes time right. So for a couple days CCC was saying maybe for healthy people in public transportation that's well ventilated maybe you don't have to wear the mask all the time and we face such a backlash. People were saying you know it's the state's duty to make the mask that people need so we really had to do a U-turn around 48 hours afterwards. Of course I guess other jurisdictions did a U-turn 48 days afterward or many months afterwards but I think that's a mistake in the very early days and after that when we roll out the mask availability map there was also data quality or rather data bias issue in that because we publish the numbers of every 30 seconds that people's purchase and we were initially quite happy because the pharmacies locations almost overlap exactly with the population centers so we felt that every individual in Taiwan are roughly the same distance away from the pharmacy loaded with some medical grade mask and so in a kind of Taipei based viewpoint this is fair right but just after a couple weeks a MP from an opposition party the Taiwan people's party MP Gaohong An she is the VP of data analytics in Foxconn before joining the parliament so she knows something about data and she analyzed it with the open street map community sign it's actually not true because while it's the same distance by helicopter if people are in rural areas and had to take public transportation maybe by the time they reach the pharmacy the pharmacy is already closed so the time opportunity cost is not the same there is bias in this data and because this evidence-based interpolation minister Chen of CCC didn't defend the policy he just said legislator teach us and then we start co-creating at just 24 hours after what we changed the distribution mechanism and we also introduced pre-ordering to the convenience store that opened 24 hours a day and then keeping health records of people and how they do it is obviously important because when we look back on this it's going to be critically important talk a little bit about what privacy protections you wanted to put in there because you know we know a lot of I know a lot of people who don't want people to know they had COVID or very or know they got a vaccine it's a it's a really it's a lot of secretiveness attacks to it and I'm not sure what that is at this moment here in this country at least but how do you deal with those issues well the main thing is that the national health care system which is universal health care which covers not just citizens but also residents and everyone who I use the good car to enter Taiwan also enjoy the health care we made sure that by law this IC card only stores your data in a way that's disaggregated with pretty much anything else it could only be used in medical services and other public services that's pre-registered with the national health insurance agency and it's never interfacing any other entities in the economic sector or other sectors and so because of that people could rest assured that every transaction that they do with this universal health card is recorded that true it's centralized that's true but it's not connected to the wider internet and it's not going to be used in anything that's not a designated purpose public service and everybody can also keep that to account by downloading the NHI app there's more than five million people downloading that in the last year they used it not only to pre-order mask or dedicate their masquerations to international humanitarian aid but also to check all their visits to to their dentists to their doctors downloading x-ray scans I think even CT scans could be downloaded and analyzed locally on the phone and so they participate in this data collaborative that they are the active participant who not can only choose what to participate in for example the mass donation stuff but also to correct the data pertaining to them if they the data are wrong so this is about the participatory auditing and control mm-hmm and talk a little targeting of people to get them to do things one of this the things that you said to me last time we talked was two things the more trust you place in the citizens the more trust worthy they become and instead of asking people to come to technology bring technology to where people are talk about the idea of trust because I think one of the issues around privacy is the lack of trust that you're saying these things but it's not what actually happens or things leak or whether they're by hacking or just by accident or malevolence or just trying to do a better business mm-hmm yeah I think the main thing about getting trust is to admit failures or u-turns or saying legislator teaches when a mistake or bias has been pointed out early on if we let it link or if we respond only after a quarter or two or if we respond by saying you know this is an emergency respond when the pandemic is over then of course that's that's over we don't earn any trust this way so I think a lot of it is about a time of response in the here and now in the last year alone there's more than two million phone calls called to the hotline that offering number 1922 where everyone can't get their privacy questions answered in the call center and even unrelated questions let that call center cannot handle for example last April there was a young boy who caused an irrational mass but why am I only getting the pink ones all the boys in my class got navy blue ones and I don't want to wear pink to school I'm a boy and then just 24 hours afterwards everybody in the ccc wore pink and then pink became the most trendy color for for quite a while and so this kind of rapid response this agile methodology made sure that we continuously integrate people's feedback I think that gone is trust when you think about this part of the mistrust has to do with polarization and misinformation and it's another thing that you tried to deal with because it creates a feeling of um this information is not being used correctly or going to other information that may seem more um trustworthy to you in some way or that you are being watched I mean it works rather well in this country that if you they know what you're doing or you know right now the rumor around vaccines is that Bill Gates is putting a chip in your vaccine and therefore it's going to track you um I asked him he said that it's not the case so talk about how you do with that because there are you know generalized feelings about privacy and surveillance that are still you know it's not the worst thing to be worried about but it can turn very ugly and get in the way of vaccines or or or mask wearing or other things like that yeah I think one of the main thing about this information um or infodemic as I prefer to call it is that it's really a symptom and a root cause is sometimes that's the uh participatory nature of uh getting the truth um figuring it out together I'll just call it journalism because in Taiwan news work and journalism is the same Mandarin word so if everyone think about how can we contribute to the common sensing of what's really happening if people feel that they are empowered for example during our election during the counting process everyone is invited even youtubers and so on to to film the entire paper-based counting process so even if people distrust the opposition party and only trust their party their parties youtubers are armed with not just a mobile phone with camera but also with an app a custom app that can count the tally in real time and synchronize that with the video footage so if the different like three different political parties youtubers agree on the counts then there's really not much room for the conspiracy theory about the election process to go viral but if people do not feel that they can actually go in and cover this whole thing if this you know magic box is doing all the counting and so on then of course that is the root cause and the disinformation we see is mostly just a symptom well sometimes they just don't believe it and even if you give them deep proof of things correct yeah surely but uh just like the herd immunity uh getting enough amounts of people in the population to participate in just a little bit of fact checking just a little bit of news work uh builds I guess nerd immunity in that even if a certain individual believes a certain thing and shared it's less likely that other people who have participated in the fact finding will reshare that piece of conspiracy theory and as long as the r-value is under one it would not go viral right so you're talking about the r-value which is a virus value too when you are thinking of this then what are some of the surveillance and privacy worries that you had to push back what were the most difficult ones I think in this there's depends on the group in the united states and other places but you know some cases they've had bad experiences with vaccine in other cases there's a whole thing around stem cells religious people thinking it was you know stem cells were used in these things there's all kinds of things that other people don't want to be tracked by bill gates and his mythical uh chip that he puts in in the vaccine so what is some of the more outlandish ones and how did you deal with them there in taiwan or maybe you didn't have them because you're better people I don't know who's vaccine sorry masks we did have a conspiracy theory that says the state is confiscating all the tissue paper material to make mask so we're run out of tissue papers soon go out and buy and people really did go out and buy and there's no tissue papers for for a morning or or two but it was countered by this very funny meme that's rolled out by our premier's office was our premier wiggling his bum and and saying very large font each of us only have a pair of botox and is it were played because in mandarin to stockpile twins sounds exactly the same as bottom one and so basically he's saying we can't use that many anyway and that went viral and and with that a very clear table saying the tissue papers are made out of south american materials and the medical grade masks are actually plastic product they're made out of domestic materials so there's no way that making the mask to 20 million a day will hurt any of the production lines of the tissue papers and just after a couple of days the rumor died down so what is it was there anything that you don't that you were worried about on people's privacy one of the things i'm thinking about right now is it's sort of it's starting to be it's somewhat of a controversy is this vaccine passport idea that you have proof of vaccine this is a surveillance problem and that some people get to participate and some don't if they don't have the vaccine talk about you know you've moved into the vaccine phase what is is that something that you all think about and how you would roll that out well we we had a lot of vaccines the flu vaccines and so one the availability of the vaccine shots and so are already tracked in a interactive map and so we just change a few parameters and now you can check the you know COVID-19 vaccine places it's exactly the same system again we don't invent new data collection or use points we just treat it exactly as any other vaccination process and your vaccination record is in the NHI app you can of course download the NHI app and look at all your visits to vaccination exactly as any other vaccines but people are opting in I mean we're not really in a rush because we've got plenty of physical vaccine that's the mask and our value is still very much below one and we don't have any local confirmed cases for quite a while now and so people are just taking their time but for the frontline health workers and later on for the like diplomats I guess people who are going to the Tokyo Olympic of course they're going to get vaccines what is the vaccine uptake in the country right now it's just started so we did not at the moment have more than the doses required for the medical workers the frontline workers I think it will be another couple months before our locally domestically produced vaccine get the EUA at which time of course we'll have plenty of vaccine and also to help other countries so one of the things you also told me was we just have a few more minutes but internet affordability is considered a healthcare right like healthcare right is privacy that same thing is it is it a right among your citizens how do you you know because there is some there is some bit of watching and monitoring them and and you're trying to get their cooperation but do you feel like it's also a right of people definitely I think privacy is not just a core human right but I would also like to say that the digital spaces need to respect the same kind of norms that we come to expect in the analog places that is to say the expected norms need not to be disrupted quote unquote just because you're in part of a digital public infrastructure as opposed to an analog public infrastructure so a digital town hall for example carries the same privacy expectations to an analog town hall the same would apply to universities learning places national parks and things like that and if we ask people to change their norm expectations drastically I think it's not just a human right problem but it's also a governance problem meaning meaning that if people behave expecting that there's certain privacy guarantees because they're acting for example in the national e-partition platform we make sure that people could post pseudonymously so people feel safe and they could post some whistleblowing stuff and people who are not 18 years old still enjoy the full citizens initiative rise and so on but if we disrupt that guarantee and reveal their real identity to their employers to the schools and so on just because it's digital and we could trick them into revealing their organizations or whatever then we're violating that's guarantee so it's not just about being legal or not it's about people behaving in a digital public infrastructure in a way that people come to feel as a safe space and therefore contributing whatever their real experiences is to the public decision making are there any differences though there are differences in between a digital and a public space I mean a analog public space well there's I think two main differences that the main thing about the digital space is that because in Mandarin digital sounds the same as plural shui right so the digital minister is plural minister so it means that each appearance could be remixed theoretically it could if you you speak here in this private conference it could be actually be screen captured and remixed and used in another place right and and this place may respect all your norms but that remixed place may violate the norms so the downstream wise a norm that propagates to the remixes and reuses that's going to be very important that's the first one and the second one of course there are the ways of impersonation of getting like identity of other people through cybersecurity means that's simply not possible thanks to a lot of physics in the analog space so what are your greatest worries around privacy after having this experience also what do you what do you think the most important things to take away for you would you said about two minutes and what are you what are your greatest worries going into because you know in all looking at it over overall it's a huge success you've had a huge success that was not replicated in other places so when you're thinking about that what do you think what are your greatest worries or things you you think are important for people to keep in mind especially around when it comes to privacy yeah I think my main worry is that other jurisdictions in the world maybe not learning about Thomas model will falsely think that's the top down lockdown shutdown take down is the only way to counter a pandemic or infodemic and my main worry is that like political capitalism but both the surveillance state and the surveillance capitalist will see this as the golden opportunity to encroach on the civil liberties and build a new norm that forces people to accept to the sacrifice of their privacies and their self agency and so the reason why we're sharing this time and model so much is not just because it's a great thing public health and economy wise but also it depends democracy and privacy and civil rights even during the pandemic actually because of that we counter a pandemic better and when you look around the world where people had were you worried about some efforts that were made that were successful that did violate privacy issues was that a worry of yours because there were lots of ways to control a population yeah definitely well dr. Lee Wenliang the original whistleblower from Wuhan PRC did save the Taiwanese people because his message that and I quote there's seven new starts cases in the Huanan civil market and of quote did make rounds to PTT the Taiwan needs digital public infrastructure subsidized by the national university with no advertisers or shareholders and people triaged out and that ended up resulting in just after 24 hours with our health inspection for all five passengers coming in from Wuhan but the same message did not reach the Wuhan people and because of their harmonization right thanks and that of course could have actually saved people in Wuhan and maybe it did reach the other social medias in the world but maybe because there's more noise than signals maybe it's like you know not public but private infrastructure like a nightclub was very loud music you have to shout to get hurt people serving toxic in drinks and with private bouncer and so on so it really did not reach the kind of rough consensus that the Taiwan people reached around the same message so getting that kind of message spread and into the radar of everyone and building an actual more rough consensus I think that's the main thing we all need to do after this particular pandemic well that's a great and rough consensus that's a great way to put it um thank you Audrey really appreciate it minister Tang and and thank you so much for doing this thank you live long and prosper all right thank you thank you Spock thank you