COVID-19 contact-tracing: Secretarium proposal to maximise impact while keeping privacy at heart

COVID-19 接触者追踪：秘书处提案，旨在最大限度地发挥影响力，同时牢记隐私

• 批准号: 72834
• 金额: $ 67.55万
• 依托单位: SECRETARIUM LTD
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Collaborative R&D
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=72834
• 关键词: COVID; 19; contact; tracing; Secretarium

Governments across the world are evaluating means to move out of COVID-19 lockdown gradually. Until researchers find a vaccine, the most effective solution appears to be infection-chain investigations, to notify encounters of infected people to self-isolate and get tested. However, those solutions raise many valid privacy concerns.The collected information, while essential for investigations to be carried out properly, can lead to mass surveillance. To protect our collective freedom, it is crucial to put in place insurances that the data will not be accessed unlawfully and that the usage is restricted to its intended use. These insurances will maintain a democratically agreed balance between the need for data on the one hand and civic rights on the other.Exposure investigations face many efficiency challenges. Automatically tracing citizens with their mobile phones has been technically limited for years to address rightful privacy concerns. The NHS is currently recruiting 18,000 contact tracers, but manual tracing is highly intrusive, can't scale, and is unlikely to identify all contacts adequately. Both automatic and manual tracing techniques are complementary and need a secure collaboration service to maximise the global impact of cluster investigation while preserving people's privacy.Secretarium has built a secure solution, currently used in financial services, that enables individual institutions to collaborate whilst keeping their respective confidential data private. We use the latest cryptography and hardware security technologies to guarantee that private data is never disclosed, as it remains encrypted even during processing. This is highly innovative because it is easy to secure data in storage and in transit using traditional encryption techniques, but it is very hard to keep it secure while being processed by a computer programme.We started adapting our technology for COVID-19 infection investigation in March, and are preparing collaboration tools to efficiently investigate infection clusters while preventing mass-surveillance. For example, this will enable infection cluster investigators to get in touch with patients without having to know their identity. By improving privacy in this way, it will give the general population more confidence and trust to use the system without fearing that their personal data is going to be misused.

世界各国政府正在评估逐步解除COVID-19封锁的方法。在研究人员找到疫苗之前，最有效的解决方案似乎是感染链调查，通知感染者自我隔离并接受检测。然而，这些解决办法引起了许多合理的隐私问题，收集的信息虽然对适当开展调查至关重要，但可能导致大规模监视。为了保护我们的集体自由，必须确保数据不会被非法访问，并且使用仅限于其预期用途。这些保险将在对数据的需求和公民权利之间保持民主商定的平衡。暴露调查面临许多效率挑战。多年来，用移动的手机自动追踪公民一直受到技术限制，无法解决正当的隐私问题。NHS目前正在招募18，000名接触者追踪者，但手动追踪具有高度侵入性，无法扩展，并且不太可能充分识别所有接触者。自动和手动追踪技术是相辅相成的，需要一个安全的协作服务，以最大限度地提高集群调查的全球影响力，同时保护人们的隐私。Secretarium建立了一个安全的解决方案，目前用于金融服务，使各个机构能够合作，同时保持各自的机密数据的隐私。我们使用最新的加密技术和硬件安全技术来保证隐私数据永远不会被泄露，因为即使在处理过程中，它也会保持加密状态。这是一项极具创新性的举措，因为使用传统加密技术很容易保护存储和传输中的数据，但在计算机程序处理时很难保持数据的安全。我们于3月开始调整我们的技术以用于COVID-19感染调查，并正在准备合作工具，以有效调查感染集群，同时防止大规模监控。例如，这将使感染群调查人员能够与患者取得联系，而不必知道他们的身份。通过这种方式改善隐私，它将使普通民众更有信心和信任使用该系统，而不必担心他们的个人数据会被滥用。