If you deplete trust , if you lose the fiduciary relationship with the so-called users, then basically what is left is just manufacturer addiction. Even that doesn’t last. I think people are more and more aware that if you build a relationship with the people, not users, it needs to be a relational. It’s not transactional. That’s what GDPR means.
It’s a well trusted source so that people can know exactly which regulations are in the way and then work with us to resolve them. The published cases really help. Previously, these are individual interpretations, but now because it’s all published and made into pretty comics and whatever, then it makes the regulators closer to people, is what we’re saying.
If people really embrace that co creation and what we call continuous democracy is there the cost of such results, then they’re much more likely to participate rather than just vote once every four years. These two targets I think still the government has some role to play in a democracy by providing trustworthy numbers in a timely and fun way. [laughs]
The second thing is that we observe that it is a global phenomenon that it reveals trust on everybody, not just public sector, but especially among the people with different feelings and thoughts. Around this region, according to the CIVICUS Monitor, we are the only jurisdiction that has a expanding civil society space in terms of freedom of assembly, speech, and so on.
This is at heart of Taipei, but we dedicate it for participatory design and co-creation of culture rather than for finance or trading of stuff. This, by itself, shows that have a public space that belongs to people and people can trust is important, and in a physical way, as a physical manifestation of the Minister of Culture’s belief in that.
I think, it’s also the whole issue around trust of the data, both your payment credentials. It’s very important. What I would say is it’s also important then to have that artificial intelligence type machine learning where just because you’ve signed in, it’s still might not be you. You can have an account take over as that happens.
The data efforts that have been terrific, I think, just getting more tech talent not to make necessarily the current government, but to apply in a few years, both on data, but also the user experience. To make people’s interaction with government as consistent as it is with the best private sector really can go a long way in building trust , right?
…Like, can you either by sort of silicon sampling and taking from a general population and simulating deliberation, getting a distribution of outcomes and using that as a way to like reflect or in the world of people having assistance, if you trust your agent, that agent can act on you and then like I can send my agent and your agent, they can deliberate and come back to us as like the best possible outcomes. It can actually… that thing can share hidden information that you have and I have that we don’t wanna…
…But when it comes to truly adverse situations, be it massive denial of service, be it survival in a censorship regime in autocracies, be it to anticipate the interactive deepfakes that’s coming by generative AI and so on, you can easily build such tamper-proof infrastructure as essentially security products that will let people still retain a sense of trust , a fabric of trust online.
Yes. Because Taiwan was in a place much like the U.S. is in now. Back in 2014, trust in government was around 9%, and society was extremely fragmented. We had a president who, it seemed, every time he spoke, the majority was against him—no matter what he said. Eventually, we occupied Parliament. Nonviolently, but it was still an occupation for three weeks.
To this end, all Class A authorities that handle the nation’s personal data have already switched to this kind of zero- trust system, especially for biometric identification. By the end of the year, I think we will spread this ZTA infrastructure not just to class A for competent authorities but also for highly regulated industries such as finance and medical and so on.
Through the administration for digital industries, another subsidiary, we co-created the SEMI E-187, which is a zero- trust cybersecurity standard for not just the semiconductor industry, but across the entire supply chain. The question we asked is that assuming that one of them is across the supply chain, is probably already breached. How do we make sure that it cannot laterally move?
But I think because their goal is to decimate trust in democratic institutions, the underlying subtext is always that democracy only leads to chaos, that democracy only leads to people hating each other. So, it’s a kind of meta-answer to your question, because if we can pre-bunk the idea that democracy only leads to polarization, then we actually tackle everything else.
…back or not. In this handing out cash, we ensure that people who prefer, who are comfortable with websites simply type their bank account, and that’s it. Then it’s wired to their bank account. People who don’t want to type anything online, who trust their bank’s automatic teller machine, can go to the ATM and get NT$6,000 cash.
There’s still this distinction, this friction of politicians just saying, “You should just trust us,” and almost the society, you can take that face value and accept that that’s the way it is. We are excited about this idea of leading and civic participation, which is so much more of what your talks are about and what your practice is about.
That shortened the contact tracing from, it used to take 24 hours, to 24 minutes if they’re using the SMS-based contact tracing. It’s very successful and toll-free too. I go into this detail because the idea of fire or eyeglass is based on this well-understood principles. If we invent new things during the pandemic, people will not trust that.
They filed three CVEs and so on to help us harden this zero trust network. That will then enable individuals in the government service to innovate and invent new applications while knowing that defense is secure, that we have a depth of defense when containing the maligned intrusions and so on that will get alert long before that attackers gets into the actual system.
If the authoritarian government treats people as kids, babies and so on, then people are not going to be very good partners because the government doesn’t trust the people in the first place. Canada, I believe, has the culture of this rough consensus, common values out of different positions, whatever polarization, you say, maybe just an artifact of the anti-social social media.
We don’t, of course, have a visibility to end-to-end encrypted conversation, like on the LINE or WhatsApp. What gives? We learned a page from the counter spam. Anyone can long-press a message saying this is abusing my trust to my friend because my friend is evidently not just simply forwarding something that trends on outrage but not fact-checking it.
Now that I’m inspired by your views on the misinformation, disinformation, countering that, how we should work more closely together on that front, I think that’s one very good element. Also, the trust , as you described the…The people feel that it’s not the government that it’s fact-checking, but it’s government empowering them to fact-check themselves.
