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

世界各国政府正在评估逐步摆脱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对感染链进行调查，通知遇到感染者进行自我隔离并接受检测。然而，这些解决方案引发了许多有效的隐私问题。收集到的信息虽然对正确开展调查至关重要，但可能导致大规模监视。为了保护我们的集体自由，至关重要的是要确保数据不会被非法访问，并且使用仅限于其预期用途。这些保障将在对数据的需求和公民权利之间保持民主同意的平衡。暴露调查面临许多效率挑战。通过手机自动追踪公民的技术多年来一直受到限制，以解决合理的隐私问题。NHS目前正在招募1.8万名接触者追踪者，但人工追踪是高度侵入性的，无法扩展，也不太可能充分识别所有接触者。自动和手动跟踪技术是互补的，需要一个安全的协作服务，以最大限度地提高群集调查的全球影响，同时保护人们的隐私。秘书处建立了一个安全的解决方案，目前用于金融服务，使各个机构能够在保持各自机密数据私密性的同时进行协作。我们使用最新的加密技术和硬件安全技术来保证私人数据永远不会泄露，因为即使在处理过程中它仍然是加密的。这是高度创新的，因为使用传统的加密技术可以很容易地保护存储和传输中的数据，但在计算机程序处理时很难保证数据的安全。我们于3月开始将我们的技术用于COVID-19感染调查，并正在准备协作工具，以便在预防大规模监测的同时有效地调查感染聚集性。例如，这将使感染聚集性调查人员能够在不知道患者身份的情况下与患者取得联系。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.