And so I believe that in Taiwan we’ve had years of citizen assemblies and also online Pol.is conversations about exactly the boundary to draw between say public health and privacy. And we did that before the community spread in Taiwan. So when the community spread did come in Taiwan, we knew exactly what to do. The civic activist invented a system based on zero-knowledge—meaning it doesn’t learn anything—when you check in a venue using a SMS QR code. The venue owner learns nothing about you, not even your phone number. Your telecom only learns a random number, they don’t know which venue it corresponds to. The state learns nothing after 14 days where it’s erased. But it does let us recursively notify people when they were in places that had community spread. And it’s entirely voluntary. However, it served us very well until the first wave of Omicron.

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