First off, I’m not a cryptographer. [laughs] I know cryptography, but I’m not a professional cryptographer. I would defer to a professional cryptographer on that one. Far as I understand, professional cryptographers looked at the first version of the notification API produced by Google and Apple.
You mean unintentionally?
“Without like in a traditional interview, where you would divulge private intimate details about your friends and families, even though the contact tracer, the medical officer, doesn’t strictly need those information. It’s a way to protect the privacy of your family.” That’s the best argument I can come up with.
I would say, “This is something that preserves your privacy, when a contact tracer, that is to say a medical officer, come and visit you, it can generate a one-time link for them to get the minimal information that they need to do their work.
You will have to pair it with a incentive structure that acts in the individual’s best interest, just as I described with medical mask used in Taiwan, which is in the individual’s own best interest and not at all for a collectivist goal. Then, maybe that has a chance to ...
Even for that, like the sports watches, there are still people with reservations, because they may not completely trust the hardware even if the software is open-source. These are legitimate concerns.
However, even if it is just collected in your own firm, that is still new data being collected. It’s just like the health apps. Some people use the walking counter, whatever, [laughs] in earphone [laughs] to improve their own health, I’m sure, and it doesn’t transmit to the cloud.
If the data is only kept in your local storage, in something that you trust, like your firm, and it works in airplane mode with only Bluetooth on, then that is something that people can verify themselves. If it’s open-source, they can ask a friend with programming capability to verify ...
I know.
If our R-value in the community is above one, that surely would have caused a community spread. Because the R-value is under one with just these measures that I just mentioned, we have empirical evidence that we probably don’t need new, additional measure.
But all the epidemiologists, I think the current consensus is that the measures that I just listed in Taiwan produce a R-value under one, which we have now empirical evidence because of the Dunmu fleet, the Panshi ship.
I really think that would be the last resort. We probably will use every single venue that does not collect new data. When those prove to be ineffective, even after hand sanitation, physical distancing, and mask use, then maybe if our R-value is still above one, we may consider app-level ...
That’s right, because we don’t collect new data.
We don’t collect new data. It’s that simple.
Because that data collection was not there before the pandemic. That’s the real reason. It’s new data being collected.
Last I heard, it was Bluetooth-only.
[laughs]
It would use GPS? It’s not Bluetooth-only?
Aside from the ration the mask, if you have extra need, like you use it all the time so nine per 14 day is not enough, you can also order online. There’s also a free market for mask in addition to the nationalized economy.
Their revenue actually grew during the pandemic. That’s very interesting. The remaining, it’s less than two Euros, overall, for 9 or 10 masks per two weeks. Even half of that or some of that is being subsidized by the distributor, the convenience store.
I don’t know. In Taiwan’s case, because the country nationalized the production and the distribution, whether it’s costly is beside point. [laughs] We end up spending…if you purchase in the convenience store, then nine mask is partially subsidized by the convenience store because they want you visit a convenience store.
I don’t really know [laughs] the precise word of that component. Other than that component, everything else is pretty much that you can locally source. I’m sure UK have those vendors. It’s just how to piece them together. That’s the main know-how.
You just need a place with sufficient room for the machinery. That’s it. Mostly, because it’s PPE material, there’s no very high-end machinery involved. I think the only high-end one is the supersonic vibrator.
You can also just talk to the vendor.
They are already in this line of business for smart machinery work. It’s just their product is probably not masks. They work with international counterparts. They’re just adding mask to one of their existing offerings.
First of all, because the machinery experts who did the Taiwan ramping up from 2 million a day to 20 million a day, they were not mask makers. They do much more higher-end [laughs] machinery. It’s like Tesla factory level people and now re-purposed doing the masks. They approach this ...
I have no idea because I’m not part of MOFA.
If there’s such a bilateral agreement, you can own that production line and even with residual PPE materials that you can use to make protective clothing or whatever. That’s something that our Minister of Foreign Affairs is now in active talks.
We have produced exactly that. We can help your machinery experts to transfer the blueprint and the knowledge. This is not something that’s a trade secret. We really want to help the world.
Yes.
We now have an export that says if you send us a place in your country with electricity, water, and firefighter or whatever in a parts of land, we can help you to build this 24-hour factory that turns out two million medical masks per day.
Well, then you can use the same system to fabric masks rationing. I think Japan did that. They sent two fabric masks to each household. That’s another alternative. Or alternatively, you can work with Taiwanese manufacturer.
You mean medical masks?
This requires enormous trust from our government to people for not abusing the system. I don’t think there’s anything technologically preventing UK or other jurisdictions from adopting this system, but it does require a culture change.
The importance here is that people can go to a pharmacy, swipe their NHI card, collect nine mask per two weeks, and if they’re adult a child and if they have a child, and see the stock level deplete by 9 or 10 after a couple of minutes. If they ...
In other jurisdictions, usually you publish numbers after a public servant have looked at it, like freedom of information may be a week or so. Every day is considered very quick, but in our case it’s every 30 second when the system first launched. In the Korean case it’s real-time.
South Korea adopted our system. South Korean people were using the same mask map produced in Tainan, [laughs] even though Finjon Kiang did not know any Korean language, [laughs] but they both speak JavaScript and OpenAPI. [laughs] It was just a universal language. [laughs] They were able to convince the ...
These three together I think have more than 10 million users, but actually there’s more than one hundred different application of voice assistance, you name it. I personally quoted a website, mask.pdis, that lists all the one hundred or so applications. All taken together, I don’t know, but a majority ...
These three together covers maybe 10 million users. Each of them, using their preferred method, can see where are their nearby pharmacies and how much medical mask do they have in stock, so they don’t have to queue in pharmacies that are out of stock.
The map. That’s not my idea. [laughs] It’s a social innovation done by people in Tainan. Started with Howard Wu (吳展瑋) and later on Finjon Kiang (江明宗) and also the HTC DeepQ team which does the line bot for the CDC (疾管家).
There are three systems all. After the three system gets introduced, now more than 21 million people have used one of the three venues which, considering we’re just 23 million people, is a huge success.
That empowers, for example, migrant workers who often use prepaid SIM to go to their nearby convenience store and instead of using their phone or a computer, they just insert the NHI card to a kiosk at a convenience store, and then they collect at the same store a week ...
However, this mostly requires a phone that’s owned by yourself, instead of prepaid SIM card, because we need to validate that you are yourself, and so you don’t double spend, so to speak. After a month, after 2.0, we did 3.0.
They go off-work when the pharmacies already close, in which case they have no way to get a mask. For these people we introduced a e-preordering system online, where they can pre-order and collect after a week in their nearby convenience store which opens 24 hours at a time.
Then, the next wave is what we call eMask or Mask 2.0. Based on analysis, we see that Mask 1.0 reaches only 70 percent of population for good reason. Independent analysis from the civil society shows in those districts, with very long-working hours in large municipalities or science parks, people ...
The good thing about this is that it requires just a little bit of patience, because there was queuing, but it’s guaranteed that people who do have the time will get the mask.
Sure. There’s actually three systems. [laughs] There’s the Mask 1.0, which is everybody can purchase mask in pharmacies, 6,000 of them, using their national health insurance card which covers 99.99 percent of population including not just citizens but also residents of more than six months. That’s the first measure.
It’s about reminding others to protect themselves. If you say, “Wearing a mask is a sign of respect,” for example, that’s harder to spread.
It’s the incentive design that’s different. When I wear a mask in Taiwan, I protect me from myself. This is a very simple to explain idea. I can remind the people that I care to protect their own health. That’s a very natural human expression.
The second thing is that in places where seeing each other’s expressions is important, it’s of course superior to mask.