Mission Impossible? A Privacy Shield in the Game between Combatting COVID-19 and Resuming Work

Following the step of Europe, the US may have entered its peak of the COVID-19 epidemic. A pressing question next is how to unfreeze and reopen the economy. 

Italy, US, and the whole world are facing the same practical questions: Who should go to work? Who needs to stay at home? Who is to be quarantined? Who can be authorized with the right to travel?

Italy has raised an idea to grant citizens with mobility rights based on test results of antibodies to the coronavirus in their blood. This suggestion might have once been expected only from science fiction. While the US is bringing up similar solutions, such fixes cannot coordinate with the situation of large-scale human migration during the reopening of the economy. Health Code, a rating app developed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba and others, safeguards people’s movement smoothly; however, at the cost of sharing and leaking users’ privacy and data. Tools like this are not doable in western counties. 

The DMA team of the Elastos community has released a product called My Green Pass to resolve this mission impossible.

Confronting the need to return to work amidst widespread of the coronavirus, individuals can record their body temperature, infection status, and travel history over the past 14 days in the Green Pass application. The app will then generate a scannable health code for the individuals to submit to the company or organization they come back. Companies will be able to decide who can resume working based on these health records. The transmission of these records is restricted to the two sides. A similar routine applies to any aspects of the economy, including big conferences, church activities, flights, checking in to hotels, and more.

Guaranteed by smart contracts, individuals can choose with which companies and organizations they want to share their health codes. In this way, while they transmit health information, their privacy remains protected against violations by centralized platforms and governments. 

“Elastos, as the second generation of the Internet, uses blockchain technology to preserve the privacy of users,” said the co-founder of the Elastos, Sunny Feng Han. “We will not own any user data.”

All the data in the Green Pass is bound with personal digital identities. Ownership of the data belongs to the users themselves. When users submit data to their personal data space, they will obtain a private key to the data. Without the permission of the owner, the data cannot be deployed.

Sunny Feng Han conveyed that they hope to respect and protect the privacy which every citizen deserves. “When we designed the system, we chose blockchain as the base technology to ensure data ownership and trust. All data points that the user submits belong to the user. It is bound with the user’s personal decentralized identity (DID). This DID is linked to your login identity in Green Pass, such as an email or social media account. It doesn’t require any sensitive personal information such as driving licenses or passports.”

“To protect the user’s privacy at a deeper level, we have made it so the Green Pass app intentionally ‘forgets’ data points in 14 days by default. This ‘short memory’ is good for protecting our privacy. It includes self-submitted daily body temperature and locations…. All data and its hash value are still stored in the decentralized public ledger or storage space under the user ownership. Without the allowance of the owner, nobody, including the application program of the Green Pass, can use these data.”

Furthermore, the Green Pass allows a third party, such as a hospital, to verify users’ personal medical data to build massive credibility of its data. To be more specific, the Green Pass acts as a digital vessel of hospitals’ test results, as data are secured on the blockchain and immutable. Individuals can as well make use of the reservation function of the application to share their health code with organizers in advance to assure various events take place on time.

“The coronavirus epidemic may last for one to two years,” said Sunny Feng Han. “Under this circumstances, Green Pass offers a feasible tech plan to restore social order.”

By Susan Feng

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