Bo-Yin Yang

I have to confess that I'm not as acutely privacy aware as my friends who are not from Taiwan, even though I'm American, too. [laughs] On the other hand, one would imagine that some kind of privacy-preserving access to many government services should be possible.

The central government and the city governments are asking sometimes, by my lights, too much information. For example, just one thing that I consider to be way too much information is when you are always on a city bus. You have to click in when you get on. You have to click out when you get off.

That is something that in a sense, the city government shouldn't be asking about, especially if you are using a ID-tied Metro card, like many people are using.

Yeah. Many Easy cards that are tied to people, there are. I always use one that's not tied to me. The government still knows that this card got on the bus here and got off the bus there. In a sense, if possible, all this should be something where the government gets as little information as possible.

I'm not saying that privacy-preserving cryptography is something that works for this particular instance.