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> Also, if we just make vaccines mandatory there's no need to check as everyone's got one.. The lowest covid risk possible, and no privacy invasion How do you

> Also, if we just make vaccines mandatory there's no need to check as everyone's got one.. The lowest covid risk possible, and no privacy invasion How do you make them mandatory without privacy invasion? You must keep records on who is unvaccinated. The precursor to every 20th century atrocity was diving the population by decree.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
The state already knows who is and isn't vaccinated, otherwise they couldn't issue the QR codes. This is already a total known in Europe. It's linked to your healthcare ID (a lot of countries in Europe have nationalised healthcare) The QR codes themselves enable businesses and government to track your detailed movements every day though. This is why that's much worse.
- rlpb 5y ago
  I wonder if it's possible to devise a QR code verification system that doesn't erode privacy. For example, what if guests could regenerate the QR code, or the app did it automatically, every five minutes? And the QR code contained nothing but a cryptographically verifiable assertion that the person presenting it is vaccinated, together with a picture (or a reference to a downloadable picture) of the guest? That would prevent the host from being able to gather anything beyond what they already can from their CCTV, while getting the vaccination assurance they need. Trouble is, I can't think of a way to do this without connectivity, and that's problematic due to downtime, service availability, and so on. A privacy eroding fallback to an offline system would be possible, but runs the risk of privacy violators simply "accidentally" losing connectivity. Anyway, there's a challenge for HN. Design such a system :-)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    The authorities actually are trying to get us to use their app which does indeed generate a new code every time. However this is something I don't like because then I have any tracking of the actual app to worry about too. Especially because their lineage is pretty murky. I've gone to a lot of trouble to get facebook and google out of my life and this feels like a big step back. So I use the paper code exclusively. Of course that also presents issues with people not owning smartphones, not knowing how to use them or having dead batteries as you mention already. But what you describe would be better than the current setup if the operator is really transparent about how any personal info is used, yes. All the covid tracking apps during the first wave were really privacy conscious (avoiding personal info, using open source etc) but the whole QR thing as introduced in Europe doesn't seem to have taken this into account at all. Of course that's because it's more personal in general but the whole open source thing has been dropped too. Only Switzerland seems to be doing that now.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

The state already knows who is and isn't vaccinated, otherwise they couldn't issue the QR codes. This is already a total known in Europe. It's linked to your healthcare ID (a lot of countries in Europe have nationalised healthcare) The QR codes themselves enable businesses and government to track your detailed movements every day though. This is why that's much worse.

rlpb 5y ago
I wonder if it's possible to devise a QR code verification system that doesn't erode privacy. For example, what if guests could regenerate the QR code, or the app did it automatically, every five minutes? And the QR code contained nothing but a cryptographically verifiable assertion that the person presenting it is vaccinated, together with a picture (or a reference to a downloadable picture) of the guest? That would prevent the host from being able to gather anything beyond what they already can from their CCTV, while getting the vaccination assurance they need. Trouble is, I can't think of a way to do this without connectivity, and that's problematic due to downtime, service availability, and so on. A privacy eroding fallback to an offline system would be possible, but runs the risk of privacy violators simply "accidentally" losing connectivity. Anyway, there's a challenge for HN. Design such a system :-)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  The authorities actually are trying to get us to use their app which does indeed generate a new code every time. However this is something I don't like because then I have any tracking of the actual app to worry about too. Especially because their lineage is pretty murky. I've gone to a lot of trouble to get facebook and google out of my life and this feels like a big step back. So I use the paper code exclusively. Of course that also presents issues with people not owning smartphones, not knowing how to use them or having dead batteries as you mention already. But what you describe would be better than the current setup if the operator is really transparent about how any personal info is used, yes. All the covid tracking apps during the first wave were really privacy conscious (avoiding personal info, using open source etc) but the whole QR thing as introduced in Europe doesn't seem to have taken this into account at all. Of course that's because it's more personal in general but the whole open source thing has been dropped too. Only Switzerland seems to be doing that now.