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

世界各国政府都在评估逐步摆脱新冠肺炎封锁的方法。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，通知遇到感染者进行自我隔离和检测。然而，这些解决方案引发了许多合理的隐私问题。收集的信息虽然对正确进行调查至关重要，但可能导致大规模监控。为了保护我们的集体自由，至关重要的是要确保数据不会被非法访问，并将其使用限制在预期用途上。这些保险将在一方面对数据的需求和另一方面对公民权利的需求之间保持民主商定的平衡。多年来，用手机自动跟踪公民的技术一直受到限制，以解决合法的隐私问题。NHS目前正在招募18,000名接触者追踪器，但手动追踪侵入性很强，无法扩展，而且不太可能充分识别所有接触者。自动和手动跟踪技术是相辅相成的，需要安全的协作服务，以最大限度地提高集群调查的全球影响，同时保护人们的隐私。秘书处建立了一种安全的解决方案，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保密。我们使用最新的密码学和硬件安全技术来保证私人数据永远不会泄露，因为它即使在处理过程中也保持加密。这是非常具有创新性的，因为使用传统的加密技术很容易保护存储和传输中的数据，但在由计算机程序处理的同时保持数据的安全非常困难。我们从3月份开始将我们的技术应用于新冠肺炎感染调查，并正在准备协作工具，以高效地调查感染集群，同时防止大规模监控。例如，这将使感染集群调查人员能够与患者联系，而不必知道他们的身份。通过这种方式改善隐私，它将给普通民众更多的信心和信任来使用该系统，而不必担心他们的个人数据会被滥用。

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.