I just wrote a poem, a prayer to celebrate that, and that became my job description. The prayer goes like this.
“When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.”
That’s my job description.
My office delegates from each ministry. We have around 12 delegates from 12 ministries. They’re section chief level or all the way to director general level and work in a very horizontal manner.
The other half of my office is experts from the RCA, from IDEO, from CIID, professional designers, facilitators, and technologists.
One of the signature platform promises of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s first term, which currently has – let’s see – one month left, but she’s got elected, so we get four more years. One of the signature promises is broadband as human right.
Even on top of Taiwan, that’s almost 4,000 meters high in the Saviah or the Jade Mountain, you still have 10 Megabits per second in a 4G connection at around €15 per month and unlimited bandwidth.
If anywhere in Taiwan you don’t have that, it’s personally my fault. I will see that it’s fixed. It makes sure that people is not just being talked to, like in radios and television era, but rather they can become co-producers.
We start teaching not media literacy, as if they were users, but rather media competence, as if they’re producers, as early as the first grade as part of our basic education.
Making sure that people, no matter whether they’re 8 years old or they’re 80 years old, can be fruitful participants into civic journalism and other endeavors that makes full use of their unlimited bandwidth at no marginal cost.
I think the most important thing is to take a deep breath and do not let anger control you. That is the most important thing. When you’re seeing a picture or a short clip that is designed to make you feel a sense of outrage and click share without fact-checking anything, you need to understand that this is a manufactured virus of the mind.
If only by taking a deep breath, you can take a little bit step back. Then you reduce the r0 value, the virality, of that message. Then it’s like wearing a protective mask. I think a habit of looking from a very social media, not from a passive consumer perspective, but rather from a producer perspective, is very important.
That’s exactly right.
I’m just 38, so it’s not…It’s just eight years before, I guess. If I go back eight years before, I would say that…No, I wouldn’t change a thing, actually. At that time, I was already planning for working on entirely for purpose and not for profit.
I guess I would encourage myself to do so even sooner than I actually did. I wouldn’t take three years to transition into entirely for-purpose. Maybe I’ve got enough savings, anyway. I should do that when I was 30 years old.
I am @audreyt, T for Tang. I am @audreyt on Twitter.
Thank you for the awesome interview, and have a good local time.
Bye-bye.
The situation is pretty calm. People feel protected. We’re like this island where we’re back to the single-digit of new cases every day, and almost all of it’s from international travelers returning home. People are feeling safe. Every two weeks, people can get 9 surgical masks if they’re adults, or 10, children’s.
The social distancing is advisory. There’s no penalty yet, but people are following the social distancing ideas very diligently. It is mostly just about putting on a mask if you happen to be indoors, and around one meter from people. It’s very mild. The tourism industry, of course, is taking a hit, as is air travel.
Otherwise, everyday industries such as restaurants operate normally. Movies are open but reconfigured their seatings so that it’s below 100 people each in an audience. Life is normal.
That’s what everybody expects, including us, which is why we started mitigating last year, whereas most countries started mitigating this year.
It’s about constraining essential freedoms. During SARS, there was a case where the entire hospital was barricaded, and people within there are forbidden to go out, including medical workers. That, of course, is a constitutional question, whether not endangering people outside of the hospital warrants putting people essentially within the barricade.
The Constitutional Court said that it is not unconstitutional, but the existing laws are lacking in terms of the due processes involved. Our laws then went through changes that explicitly spells out these processes. One, the main thing that you’re concerned about, is about out of purpose use of collected private information.
That is in our Privacy Act, which is GDPR compatible-ish. We’re getting adequacy soon. Before we get an adequacy, I would not say it’s fully compatible, but it’s quite compatible because it’s based on a European Union Privacy Act before the GDPR.
It specifically said that you can only use the collected information such as the whereabouts of the phone of the telecom companies, if it protects other people, the general public, from harm, and/or it protects the person themself from harm.
In the Constitutional Court ruling, if barricading people so that they cannot leave an institution, a building, is ruled constitutional, then certainly getting this out-of-purpose signal data from the telecom providers is constitutional, because it’s used only for the purpose of digital fence.
Digital fence in its worst form is exactly the same as a barricade. It’s almost always better than the physical barricades, from the constitutional human right viewpoint. The legality of this is not disputed this time.
When we say outside of purpose, we mean that we don’t actually touch the data collection phase. It is mostly the data processing and application phase that we’re touching. The telecoms are already collecting the signal strength.
The amount of data collected is minimal, for people under home quarantine for 14 days. We’re just sending them instant messages where they reply, with their temperature, whether they show symptoms, and any suggestions they have to the quarantine experience. That’s the only data that we collect. It’s minimal, and we can prove it’s necessary.
For people under the home quarantine, they’re clearly informed of it, although there is no consent process because constitutionally, there is no requirement for a consent process.
It’s a large amount of people, like 50K, but yes.
Yeah. If they break out of the quarantine, of course, the automated system, as you see on the picture, notifies the county governments, the neighborhood managers, the police dispatch if they went too far from the quarantine, if necessary.
Of course, we then use the digital fence checking to make sure that if they significantly overlap with other people’s phones, then they may be also at risk. That is only if you escape quarantine.
Exactly.
I don’t think we use signals other than the ones provided by the telecoms. It’s mostly base station data. This system is developed in Taiwan. It’s one of the major telecoms, the Chunghwa Telecom developing it. The other four telecoms voluntarily participated. They settle on an API so that even across different telecom providers, this system can calculate proximity.
Of course. Something like that. This application layer, that is the location history tool, it’s developed by civil society here in Taiwan. It’s also been incorporating data from Korea as well as from Israel. It relies on an application-level feature of Google called Location History, which is for a phone installing Google Maps or an Android phone in general that enable location history tracking.
Then you get the Google Maps timeline. The basic idea of this simple tool, which is a web-based tool, is that it automatically ask you to download the last period of your Google history as well as any API-compatible service, and also downloads the available data of specific cases so that it calculates overlaps entirely locally.
It doesn’t tell you what to do. It just shows how the contact worked. In this way, your location history is not shared. It doesn’t really leave your phone. It’s between you and the nav sources.
No, the information, with this tool, because this tool is general-purpose, it’s for people not under home quarantine. We do not have the constitutional right to force them to share anything.
Right, so they wear a mask and get a check from the local clinic.
Well, I guess that’s like asking how do we enforce washing your hands with soap? We do not enforce that, but people do that.
Because people don’t want to be sick, and we have a single-payer health system. They are not going to pay much for the treatment, and the surgical masks are plentifully available.
Putting on a mask, protecting others, going to a clinic to get a check is the logical thing to do if you know that you’re going to be protected and you’re not going to cost a fortune.
Yes. Or between Google and you, but yes.
Their whereabouts, yes.
Of course. Every person under quarantine, as I said, other than their temperature and their symptoms, we collect their feedback to the system. It’s continuously being updated by people’s feedback. There’s a lot of challenges, of course.
There will be, for example, spammers that masquerade as the SMS checkers, and it’s solved using crowdsourcing, it’s called Whoscall, it’s another technology.
Or we can switch to the LINE system, which has a verified account. It’s like WhatsApp. A chatbot can then automate most of the daily checking, so that we free up some chores from the local managers.
There’s also the challenge of people simply going into the quarantine not expecting to pay for the accommodation, but actually, the conversation comes after getting them the accommodation. If people come to Taiwan but with no cash and so on, the local government need to find them somewhere, and so there’s dedicated dormitories and now hotels dedicated for this purpose.
