Trustless Approaches to Digital Infrastructure in the Crisis of COVID-19
Australia’s newest COVID app, home-grown surveillance technologies and what to do about it
ABSTRACT
This week, the Australian Government proposed a mobile phone-based tracking application to address the spread of coronavirus. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated an acceleration of government-led surveillance technology around with the world. At present, the significant uptick in digital tools as a policy response to address the public health crisis are not being matched by suitable policy clauses or technology design to serve the interests of Australian citizens. This article presents the global contact-tracing phone app responses to COVID-19, outlines the key privacy concerns and presents alternative policy pathways and technical approaches towards privacy preservation and trustless (trust minimising) digital infrastructure to improve Australia’s digital-political response to COVID-19.
II. INTRODUCTION
A wave of government issued technology responses is being implemented globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around the world, governments’ have leapt at the opportunity to implement technical responses in the form of facial recognition cameras, surveillance drones, digital currency welfare pay-outs, artificial intelligence, and digital public health rating systems, as are already in place in China.
While public-health and safety amidst crisis is imperative, the data rights and privacy policy responses that occur at this critical juncture, as well as afterwards, must be carefully considered.
This paper seeks to answer the questions of:
- What are the contact tracing app trends in response to COVID-19?
- What are the essential policy considerations for digital crisis response technologies?
- How do we design and build trustless digital infrastructure to support a healthy, functioning democratic society?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3579220
“The ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’ argument is one potential response when it comes to government surveillance and information collection at scale. COVID-19 has been coined the new War On Terror, with mass compliance to changes in data rights and privacy encouraged in the interests of national security.
The fallacy of the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is that privacy is not stolen in a single attack. Privacy is structural. It is built into technical, legal, moral, economic and societal norms. This means that privacy is won or lost incrementally. It is the mass aggregation, data mining, secondary use and de-anonymisation after collection that erodes human dignity and digital rights.
The problem with government issued applications in conjunction with closed, proprietary smartphone provider companies is that citizens have little say over the scope of data collection about them or “the development of private platforms, run by private entities, with often opaque decision-making processes, behavioural analytics and identity profiling and data on-selling”.
The design, implementation and adoption of complex socio-technical systems must be driven be the interests of users.”
See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3579220
