@Ed209 is there any movement like this going on in the UK, and what are your thoughts?
Vaccine passport apps could help us return to normal. First they need to solve the trust problem
I'd say I'm conflicted. From a tech point of view, yes, these apps need to solve the privacy problem and knowing what I do about the domain space, they probably won't.
Beyond that, this is just a culturally and conceptually interesting question to me. We've never considered having a "vaxx passport" for any of the stuff we vaxx for which is demonstrably more deadly or higher RO than COVID-19 (say, Measles). At the same time, none of those diseases have ever been endemic during the modern era when this tech is possible.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, though,
if we're going this route with COVID-19 vaccines, as in
"as a society we are saying that you need to carry a digital vaccine passport if you want entrance into various private businesses", well, why
wouldn't we also include influenza there? It's common, it's endemic, it kills ~a quarter million people globally in a good year, and we have well tested vaccines which, at worst, provide some measurable protection against being able to get sick or spread the disease to at risk people.
I think these questions are interesting; it's actually easier for me to imagine the UK imposing "vaxx passport" mandates at a national level than in the US, where you would instantly have ~30 states suing the federal government over it. At the same time, there is very little in the US to prevent private businesses from requiring vaxx proof for entry, and I believe we're going to start seeing that happen. Of course, the regions that will adopt such measures without having legal battles over it, will generally line up with regions where vaxx rates are higher and people are already taking things seriously, because that's how this silly country operates.
Curious if you're seeing movement on a push for or against "vaxx passports" there, and what your thoughts are, as someone who has been deeply personally impacted by this shitty virus.
Looking at this as a basically socially liberal, fiscally conservative American centrist, I fully support the rights of
private business, enterprise and personal domiciles to deny entry based on vaxx status. I don't necessarily have a conceptual problem with putting a legal framework around that, but, cynically, this sounds a lot like yet another database of my personal information that the government will have and then resell to various huge corporations without my knowledge and consent.
There are technical
solutions -- it's entirely possible for someone to posses a cryptographically signed passport which can both be used in this manner, and which the user can subsequently revoke all ability for anyone else to read or "have read" in the past. However, given how poorly our lawmakers understand tech in general, I am not very bullish on getting something like a really bulletproof, single national system. I think we're going to get different regions and pharmacies using everything from apps to different paper passes, it will be a mess, and just like with driver's licenses, whatever state has the easiest to counterfeit vaxx pass, will end up having a lot of counterfeited vaxx passes. "Oh yea, I got my shot in Texas before I drove up here to Brooklyn, yep".
Member
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. There's a company called Ocean Protocol who have created an innovative way for data owners to share their information with data consumers without anyone needing to see the raw data. This idea has allowed scientists and other interested parties to access datasets on corporate servers that were previously locked away. The amount of useful information that sits upon a server somewhere, unused, is truly staggering. The idea is to keep the data behind a firewall whilst AI models review it and then spit out model predictions or assessments based upon what's there. One example use-case is climate science.
. Three more weeks and the card is paid off...
