Chapter 2: Watching You — The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology? (2021)

Chapter 2: Watching You. In the first half of 2020, the scourge of COVID-19 saw citizens of Western democracies placed into lockdown by their governments. Inbound flights were cancelled, businesses were forced to close, access to hospitals for non-COVID patients was restricted, and millions of people were ordered to stay at home. Naturally, once the initial shock had passed, thoughts began to turn to when and how these measures might ever be lifted, with most people pinning their hopes, perhaps rather optimistically, on the speedy development of a vaccine, and in the shorter term, an effective testing system. That way, so the argument went, if you have been vaccinated or were in possession of a recent negative test result, you would be free to start living your life more normally again. Some went on to argue that this would mean having to find a way of verifying who had been vaccinated or tested. Among those proposing such a system was billionaire businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates, who used one of his regular 'Ask Me Anything' sessions on he said it to suggest that, to quote, "Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently, or when we have a vaccine, who has received it." Some people began to speculate about where this was all going. According to one website, Gates had apparently been in discussion with scientists at MIT about how best to identify who had and who had not been vaccinated against the virus. Others pointed to the fact that the Gates Foundation had allegedly funded projects to develop human implantable microchips. Would we all soon be tagged as fit or unfit to participate in society? This was not simply idle speculation, or social media-fuelled hysteria of conspiracy theorists. It was also based on media reports of plans for some kind of health passport to facilitate the return of global travel., and suggestions that the governments of countries such as Germany were considering issuing vaccination certificates to their citizens. But why was there any anxiety at all about these proposed measures? To many people, they simply seemed like common sense, but to many others, they represented a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between the citizen and the state in a liberal democracy. If these kinds of measures were introduced, they argued, it would be up to governments to provide permission via some kind of health -based identification system for individual citizens to go back to work and earn a living, to begin socialising again, and to be free from the lockdown rules that affected the rest of the population. Those with the right certification would be free to live their lives. Conversely, those without certification would remain locked in their homes. Many people began to fear that their biological health status was about to become their de facto identity. In August 2020, a report issued by the Tony Blair Institute made just such a recommendation. It called for the immediate establishment of a digital ID system through which people shown to have taken a COVID-19 test would receive a credential to be stored alongside their other credentials in their digital wallets. The report then set out how this credential might be used, quote: 'Users would share this digitally signed credential with third parties via a scannable QR code when entering a restricted setting. To prevent people from screenshotting and sharing codes with others, QR codes would have to be unlocked via a biometric check, e.g., fingerprint or selfie, and would refresh regularly to prevent fraud. For verifying parties, they would scan this QR code simply using a smartphone or other device, e.g., the tablets already used in many offices to register visitors, with each scan calling the government platform API to ensure the issuer's signature is authentic and up to date. What's described here is not only an extraordinarily complex centralised system of identity verification, it is a huge infringement of our civil liberties. The report concedes as much, stating that, to quote, 'Identity has long been a politically fraught issue,' end quote, in the UK. But it also argues that COVID-19 presents a use case that is fast racing ahead of policy. And it expresses a preference for some kind of user-centric data management system. The reality, however, as we saw in Chapter 1, is that the UK government has not set up its verification systems in that way, so it begs the question: why should a country with a long-standing history of rejecting identity cards rush to embrace a new national centralised system of digital ID? It is hard to avoid the feeling that some governments and global institutions, such as the UN, which committed to delivering digital identity for all by 2030, but never determined how, have leapt on the COVID-19 crisis to achieve their aim. The truth is that governments do not have to go to the effort of issuing certifications or implanting microchips in order to register or monitor their citizens. There is already a lot of technology on our streets and in our homes that could be applied for such surveillance, including facial recognition, phone tracking, and the tracing of electronic payments. As futurist Dr. Ian Pearson puts it, quote, 'States can monitor a person's movements and activities and deem them to be unclean—carrying a virus or carrying the wrong opinion—and they could simply be blocked from travelling or moving around at all,' he said. The response of the South Korean government to the emergence of COVID-19 provides a good case in point. After the novel coronavirus was first detected in China, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in South Korea applied the lessons it had learned during the outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 2003, racing to develop tests and cooperating with diagnostic manufacturers to get them rapidly produced. As early as the 7th of February 2020, when there were only a few cases in the country, the first test was approved for deployment, and contact tracing was implemented to identify the people and places affected by the virus. The South Korean authorities would go on to carry out the equivalent of 5,200 tests per million population while the US was managing only 74 tests per million. Unsurprisingly, the world's media held up South Korea as a great example for all other countries to follow. And while the country's approach did seem successful at first—for example, not one single health worker was recorded as having the virus—people started to question whether there was a hidden cost. The South Korean government had the authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who tested positive for COVID-19. To reconstruct their recent whereabouts. This information, stripped of any personal identifiers, was then made available to social media apps, which allowed users to determine whether they had crossed paths with an infected person. This approach might have provoked little anxiety were it not for the fact that a spreadsheet began to circulate on Twitter. It included information such as the surname, gender, year of birth, district of residence, professional, and travel history of patients being treated for the virus, as well as the name of the hospitals where they were being tested. There's a good chance that this spreadsheet was faked, but people nevertheless became anxious, and the country's Human Rights Commission expressed concern over the excessive disclosure of citizens' personal details. The commission also went on to cite a recently conducted independent survey that had found that people in the country were less worried about contracting COVID-19 than they were about the criticism that they might receive from their community if this became known. We have already seen in Chapter 1 that the Chinese government is more than happy to employ technologies to subject private citizens to this kind of public judgment. It is an approach overtly enshrined in its Social Credit System , which makes no secret of the fact that it has a moral element to it, an element that can be traced back through Chinese culture where the concepts of legality and morality have long been viewed as one and the same thing. As Roger Kremers puts it, 'governing the country by virtue is seen as equal to governing the country by law.' In other words, coercing citizens to behave morally is seen as a means to an end, and for the Chinese government, that end is to cultivate a society that acts in harmony. In the words of Adam Knight, whose PhD thesis examines the intersection of Chinese law, technology, and social governance, The SCS is the world's largest social experiment, applying theories of behavioural science to a population of 1.4 billion people. It is also, as several experts in the field have pointed out, not one unilateral system, but rather an ecosystem of several social management or social credit systems. Most are operated by the Communist Party of China through local government, but others are designed and run for commercial ends by private companies. Such as Tencent and Alibaba. These privately run systems are less influential by moral compliance and more by financial credit scoring, and it is perhaps interesting to note that they are also less trusted than those operated by the government. Given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government, it is no surprise that the operation of the SCS depends heavily on the use of identity cards. In 2004, as we touched on in Chapter 1, a new generation of these cards was introduced, 'each carrying an 18-digit code combining personal information such as your issuing local authority, date of birth, and other personal information.' Over time, all the various elements of the SCS have since coalesced around this unique ID number so that every data point has become attached to it. Social media accounts, biometrics like facial recognition, and Social Security numbers were all added until not only did people end up with a social credit score but a social credit code. —an 18-digit number that combines all of your behaviour and links them all to your social connections too. The most overtly moral aspect of the SCS and Identity Card System is the Joint Punishment System, which was first introduced in 2014. Initially designed to penalise citizens for not carrying valid legal documentation, the JPS has since, entirely unsurprisingly, been extended so that it is now possible for the government to blacklist anyone who does not behave in the stipulated manner. Importantly, while 'bad' behaviour might see your name stay on the blacklist for 2 years, display of 'good' behaviour might get you off the blacklist sooner, and further bad behaviour can see your punishment lengthened. Public humiliation is part of the system. If your name is on the blacklist, you can be named in the media, and in some cities, anyone calling you on the phone will be notified that the person you are calling is on the central credit blacklist before being put through. As Orwellian as this might seem to us in the West, these social credit systems are not unpopular with Chinese citizens. In a fascinating piece of in-market research, Professor Gini Okoszka of the Freie Universität Berlin carried out a cross-regional survey looking at the appeal and approval of the various commercial and local government-run social credit systems among those they most She found that 80% of respondents approved of the systems and only 1% disapproved, with most believing that they provide an essential form of social management that improves the quality of life for all. This is no doubt a reflection of the trust in hierarchical systems that seem to be so much a part of Chinese culture. In fact, one of the reasons why respondents considered state interference in their lives to be a good thing was because it might restore trust in society. Not between citizen and state, but between citizen and citizen. A remarkable 76% of the respondents in the survey stated that they felt there is mutual mistrust between citizens in China. The survey certainly shows that people had little concern that their personal data would be used for surveillance, but perhaps that is in most part down to expectation management. Most citizens understood or assumed the government would already have access to that kind of personal data on its citizens. As Roger Creamers remarks, 'If we're looking at high-security or crime issues, or suppression of dissidents, or ethnic separatism, the Chinese government has tools that are far blunter and frankly far scarier than social credit.' The response of the Chinese government to the COVID-19 pandemic has also been instructive. Each citizen's digital ID number was linked to a new system called Health Code, which assessed their travel history, their exposure to known carriers of the virus, and their health risks overall, and then every day at midnight assigned them one of three colours: red, yellow, or green. Only a green code, which signified the owner was not under quarantine, would permit them free movement around the city. But not long after the state system was instituted, it was reported that Beijing restaurant requirements were including a temperature check and a scan of your code on the door. A green code would gain entry, but yellow or red would see you go hungry. State and business in perfect harmony. Or in perfect humiliation. In an astonishing infringement of personal liberty and personal data, people were even allowed to check the colour code of their neighbours. To supporters of China's social credit systems, they represent technology in the service of transparency, collecting data on individual citizens and making it publicly available for the common good. They are about social cohesion, harmony, and trust. But to its detractors, it is simply the blanket application of suffocating citizen surveillance, the kind of control measure that you would expect of an authoritarian communist regime. It wouldn't work in our liberal democracies. We wouldn't let it, or so we like to think. The reality is that the deployment of surveillance technology tends to creep in slowly so that it arrives mostly unnoticed, and it almost always does so under the guise of public protection. As Lord Sumption, former UK Supreme Court Justice, said during the COVID-19 crisis, 'The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it's not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It's usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat, but usually exaggerated.' One day in March 2020, in the unremarkable sleepy town of Neath in Wales, People were quietly queuing outside shops to buy essentials such as food or medical supplies. Suddenly the peace was interrupted by the whirring of a drone overhead. It landed on the pavement outside a Specsavers store, declared itself a messenger of Neath Port Talbot Council, and started blaring instructions at everyone, telling them to follow government rules, to go home and to stay home, and that they should only be outside for food, for health reasons or for exercise. Which is exactly what they were doing. A video quickly circulated on Twitter, with hundreds of people decrying it as an unprecedented civil infringement, a dystopian nightmare made real. Whether the threat is exaggerated or not, the coronavirus pandemic saw many governments declare some kind of state of emergency and pass laws that gave their institutions unprecedented and unparalleled powers.. And as Lord Sumption suggested, this went largely unnoticed. The mainstream media either chose to obsess over the gory details of hospital patients dying in their droves, or actively supported such measures, scolding anyone who decided to go out for a walk and baying for governments to 'lock us all in our houses to reduce the spread of the virus'. In August 2020, for example, there were cheery bulletins on the Seven News Melbourne network on local policing plans to repurpose high-powered drones, usually used to read car number plates from a distance of 500 metres, now to identify people not wearing a face mask outside. We saw a similar picture around the world: drones deployed in Spain to catch and fine people disobeying lockdown orders; the use of smartphone tracking technology in Israel to monitor the movements of the population; visitors to Hong Kong from abroad issued with tracking wristbands; and citizens in Poland asked to submit geolocated selfies at random times of the day to make sure they were abiding by the rules. Each of these, in quote, 'protective measures' is, whether intended to or not, a pernicious diminishment of our individual liberty, and they look set to long outlast the effects of the pandemic itself. Indeed, so the argument goes, The only way we can avoid further pandemics is for us to get used to the ongoing surveillance of public health. As the scale of the COVID-19 crisis became apparent, in March 2020 Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, gave an interview in which he argued for the use of a new kind of large-scale health survey, explaining that we live in a more globalised networked world in which epidemics like SARS, Ebola, and avian flu are more easily spread, he suggested that governments should be conducting proactive rather than reactive surveillance. Asked what he meant by surveillance, he said, 'It's like running surveys, except the surveys would involve taking people's blood. So systematically looking for diseases, having these population-level samples just sitting there routinely in a lab so they can be analysed, rather than waiting to see if disease comes.' We could have population surveillances all the time, like we do with political polls and social science polls. That's how we get our unemployment rate number each year. It's just a big survey where people call and ask, 'Are you working or not working today?' Professor Bhattacharya does not advocate a nationwide census, but we might well see something close to this introduced in Africa almost by default. A new biometric identity platform is due to be launched on the continent shortly. Funded by the Gates Foundation, the platform will store people's vaccination records via Gavi, the international organisation created by Bill Gates for helping underprivileged children with access to vaccines, and issue them with an AI-based authentication via Trust Stamp. The hope is that it will become normal in some parts of Africa, and possibly other developing nations, for people to receive vaccinations in exchange for registering themselves using a biometric that can be associated with an ID card. You go for your vaccine, they take your details and scan your fingerprint, you leave with a digital ID so that you never have to bring a physical ID card along again. They leave with your data. On the surface, this might seem perfectly laudable, but writing about the scheme in digital rights newsletter Reclaim the Net, Naga Pramod says, 'What seems to be an effort to improve immunisation measures can also be an experiment for fine-tuning the technologies involved before they're made available for widespread global use. And those uses may take us into even more overtly controversial territory. It is worth noting, for example, that Trust Stamp is looking to partner with correctional systems to provide authentication services to individuals on parole without the need for ankle tags. It would not be the first time that digital surveillance has been used to monitor and control the behaviour of a chosen group. In May 2020, the UK government introduced what it called sobriety tagging, where criminals who have committed alcohol-fuelled offences are not sent to prison but are instead fitted with an ankle tag. The idea is not simply that the tag monitors their location, it also monitors their sweat on a half-hourly basis to establish whether they have been drinking. Again, this may not seem objectionable to some people, but what if the government decided to combine health data with crime data, and increase their use of this kind of technology to monitor other types of rule-breaker? What if it chose to mount such surveillance on people found not to have worn a mask in public, or—if a vaccine becomes available—on those caught going into a shop when they've yet to receive the jab? Once governments know they have the power to 'correct' people's behaviour in this way, it's all too tempting for them to implement such draconian measures more and more widely. Regardless of whether governments choose to make use of such powers, COVID-19 has given them more chance to do so in the future. Amid all of the requirements for us to wash our hands, wear a mask, and practice social distancing, many of us have also been persuaded to make greater use of 'safer'—or at least more hygienic—technologies such as contactless payments, and virtual meetings. Before the pandemic, we tended to think of these non-physical versions of behavioural activities as in some way less genuine or real. There was a feeling that virtuality was pretending to be something it was not, imitating the real world, lacking that all-important materiality. But during the pandemic, we have started to think of this same immateriality as a benefit and conversely, we have started associating physicality with harm. So prevalent has this shift in our attitudes become that it could well be here to stay. We have already seen this happen in Asia after the SARS outbreak, where people are now much more accepting of touchless technology at work and at home. Face recognition technology, for example, has become much more widely used to unlock doors at home, allow entry into offices, and monitor passengers on the transport network around China. No doubt we'll now see the West follow suit. After all, as technology news provider The Information reported in March 2020, one 146-year-old bathroom company saw an 8-fold surge in demand for touchless toilets in just 2 weeks. If we accelerate towards this world of touchless technology, we must remember that it will also make us utterly trackable. And in ways that many of us have not fully appreciated. Just as card payments have largely replaced cash transactions and made us more trackable, we are coming to a point where cards will not be necessary either. Soon, all you will need is yourself. Your body will become the biometric gateway to the way you interact with the world around you. And of course, a gateway that can be used by others who want to know you better and to influence and even predict your behaviour. Over in China, for example, people are already using their faces to make transactions. In over 300 KFC outlets across the country, thanks to a collaboration with online payments platform Alipay, customers can choose to have an image of their face linked to their account so that they can be recognised by a sensor at the till. A link is then automatically established to their mobile account, and all they need to do to make a payment is smile. Similarly, Amazon is set to trial the use of gesture-based transactions at its two physical stores in Seattle. Here, you would link a scan of the palm of your hand to your bank card and then be able to authorise payment just by hovering your hand over a sensor. Apple, too, have been granted a patent for an advanced Face ID feature that uses sub-epidermal imaging and face vein matching to distinguish even between the faces of identical twins. And a San Francisco-based company called RedRock Biometrics is marketing a product called PalmID that allows any camera-equipped device to recognise and use your palm print as a unique biometric signature. Interestingly, the company waived the licence fee for their product during the pandemic, again demonstrating the growing link between public health and biometric technology. Perhaps most remarkable is a new product about to be launched by a Russian company called NtechLab, which will apparently be able to get a fix on your silhouette and then use this to track your movement through a crowd, intended to identify those who are not social distancing. Even just a cursory look at the website for Face++, one of the biggest facial recognition development companies in China, can provide a sense of where these biometric identification systems might be taking us. It talks, for example, of assigning a 'beauty score' or a 'skin status evaluation' to a face. It isn't clear how Face++ sees this working, but it's easy to imagine such data analysis being of interest to, say, a cosmetic brand that wants to target its makeup products at you, or a health insurance company that wants to keep tabs on whether you're about to come down with another flu virus or are starting to show signs of too many moles. If that already makes you feel a little uneasy, you should bear in mind that you cannot escape this kind of technology even in your own home. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wired magazine reported that remote working teams were being watched by their employers through webcams via always-on video services like Sneak. It also reported that employers had developed facial recognition software to log employees' absences from their computer screens, including for bathroom breaks. And that keystroke monitoring technology was being used to track, record, and analyse keyboard activity to assess how individual workers were utilising their work time. Eye-opening though all of this is, we have so far only looked at how this kind of technology can be used to create a record of our past and present behaviour. What about how we are going to behave in the future? Imagine how valuable it would be for governments or businesses to be able to predict who is going to do what, where, and when. This may sound like something out of a Philip K. Dick science fiction story and 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, but the truth is it's all too real. Back in 2018, Michal Kosinski, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Stanford University, published a controversial paper in which he demonstrated the use of a facial analysis algorithm to determine whether someone was gay or straight. Kaczynski gathered together images of men and women, both gay and straight, and asked a range of people to identify the sexual orientation of each, finding that they were able to do so correctly in only 61% of male cases and 54% of females. Assigning the same task to his algorithm, he found that it was able to make an accurate identification in 81% and 74% of cases respectively. When he then increased the number of photographs shown to the algorithm for each participant from 1 to 5, its accuracy increased to 91% for men and 83% for women. Professor Kosinski's paper captured a good deal of media coverage and prompted widespread discussion about what else this kind of software might be able to pick up by reading the subtle differences in our facial structure. In The Economist, for example, Kaczynski is quoted as saying, 'With the right data sets, similar AI systems might be trained to spot other intimate traits, such as IQ or political views. Just because humans are unable to see the signs in faces does not mean that machines cannot do so.' Perhaps, as in Minority Report, this kind of facial analysis could even be used to predict our propensity to commit a crime. It's a perturbing thought, a future in which we are subjected to public surveillance and privately conducted analysis, and then assigned a sexuality, voting intention, level of potential criminality, and who knows what else by a faceless organisation. It would be the ultimate outsourcing of our identity to an anonymous external authority. A world in which we would be told who we are and what we are going to be possibly before we even know ourselves. Author Yuval Noah Harari has recently talked about what effect this kind of technology might have had on his life, had it been able to analyse his behaviour when he was just 14 years old. I walk down the beach and the algorithm analyses if I focus on cute guys or cute girls, or it analyses what happens to my eyes when I watch videos or television, and it discovers that I like boys more than girls, and it uses it to manipulate me in some way. If it's a bad manipulation, using this knowledge to sell me something I don't need, they show me commercials with sexy guys so I buy their product and I don't know why, then they are using it against me. But the really big issue is what if the algorithm isn't malign and I don't know this about myself, but the algorithm knows it. I mean, shouldn't it tell me that I'm gay? Should it expose me slowly to different contents that will enable me to realise this about myself? Harari's question is posed as a hypothetical one, but Michal Kaczynski thinks we are entering a new reality in which personal privacy is already no more than an illusion. It is a lost war, he says. We should focus on organising our society in such a way as to make sure that the post-privacy era is a habitable and nice place to live. So what should society look like in the post-privacy era, and how can technology be used to empower rather than disempower citizens? For answers, we could do a lot worse than look to Taiwan. There, the government uses technology in ways that not only support the principles of democracy, but that encourage all of its citizens to harness their individualism and unique perspectives for the greater good of society. It's a system of governance that values consensus rather than conformity. What sets Taiwan apart is that it has harnessed digital technology to ensure the full participation of the population in policymaking, and so take advantage of the country's collective intelligence. At the heart of this is a decentralised civic technology platform called gov.asia, on which the agenda is set by government ministries, but which allows citizens to access government data and provides tools for them to influence policy. Then there's the Join platform at join.gov.tw, which allows citizens to influence the agenda by raising petitions on subjects that matter to them. What's common across the two platforms is that there is an upvote and downvote function for people to provide feedback. The idea of these sites is not to provide a forum for debate, People can do that using other means. Instead, according to Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister, it's all about scouting for consensus. We respond only to the ideas that can convince all the different opinion groups. So people are encouraged to post more eclectic, more nuanced ideas, and they discover at the end of the consultation that everybody actually agrees with most things, and most of their neighbours on most of the issues. And that is what we call the social mandate, she says. In fact, the Taiwanese government finds all sorts of ingenious ways to bring people closer to the levers of power. Audrey Tang explained: We tour around Taiwan. I tour every other week or so with either our youth advisors—that's the reverse mentors in our cabinet—or with the ministries that participate in the Social Innovation Action Plan. In either case, I will go to more rural places, remote islands, or very high mountains and just work with a regular town hall. And when she says work, what she means is that she brings the whole government with her by virtue of a telepresence wall that projects the 5 municipalities and the central government together virtually in the same place. It's part of a policy of 'listening at scale', which helps the government get a rough consensus and create the right tools to help the people in return. In contrast to the mutual mistrust felt by the Chinese citizens, there is a sense of community trust in Taiwan that has been fostered by more, not less, digital democracy. As Tang puts it: 'This is not about people trusting the government more; this is about the government trusting the citizens more, making the state transparent to the citizen, not the citizen transparent to the state.' One of the benefits of this close relationship between state and citizens can be seen in the reaction of Taiwan to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, especially when compared to the country's experience of the SARS virus in 2003. Back then, Tan explains, the country experienced a very unpleasant lockdown, and the Constitutional Court eventually deemed that the measures enacted by the government were barely constitutional. The Taiwanese legislature was therefore charged with finding an alternative approach to future epidemics, involving more due process rather than draconian lockdowns. As a result, when COVID-19 arrived, Taiwan's response was based on a much more inclusive, information-sharing, and consultative philosophy. Recognising the importance of repressing transmission, for example, the government arranged for every citizen to receive a free mask by heading to a local pharmacy and presenting their national insurance card. Not only that, but it created an online tool that gave citizens the details of the 6,000 pharmacies taking part in the scheme and provided the stock levels of each one based on information that updated every 30 seconds. It even came with a chatbot voice assistant service so that blind people could access the same information. As a result, every citizen was kept informed of the country's supply of masks in real time. And the flow of information also ran in the other direction. When the government realised that 20% of the population especially young people working long hours, could not get to a pharmacy during opening hours, it worked with convenience stores to make them a pickup point too. As a result, collecting a mask became possible for every citizen around the clock. The creation of a technological interface between the government and its citizens also made it possible to mount a highly effective and pro-social communications campaign. When people in the country first heard of the virus, for example, they did what everyone else in the world seemed to do: they raced to the shops to buy toilet rolls. The government responded by producing a series of social media memes, including a cartoon image of the Premier wiggling his bottom alongside the words, 'Each of us has only one pair of buttocks.' The fact that these messages went viral no doubt helped to reduce the sudden spike in demand. In a similar 'humour spreads faster than rumour' vein, the Ministry of Health and Welfare made use of a cartoon spokesdog to reinforce the idea that people should keep 'two dog lengths apart' when outdoors and 'three dog lengths apart' when indoors. The open channels of communication between government and citizens also allowed the powers that be to respond with remarkable agility. In April 2020, for example, stories circulated on social media that Taiwanese boys were afraid of being bullied at school because they had been issued with pink face masks. The next day, at the daily livestreamed press conference held by the Central Epidemic Command Centre, every single one of the male officials who attended was wearing a pink face mask. No colour is exclusive for girls or boys. Said Minister Chen Hsin-chung at the event. It was the kind of rapid interaction between state and citizen that sets Taiwan apart. Today, Taiwan doesn't need a new initiative to open its shops and restaurants and get businesses going again after COVID-19, because it never shut down. It never locked down its citizens or compromised their liberty while tackling the virus. The government saw the epidemic as a problem that it could innovate itself out of and use the tools of digital democracy to energise the population to find solutions. In fact, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the country. It was the transparency and trust embedded within Taiwan's open-source approach that meant it was the first to pick up news of the virus and warn the rest of the world. In December 2019, a Chinese doctor called Li Wenliang posted online about some sort of new SARS-like virus but was quickly silenced by the Chinese government and was later reported to have died of the disease. The world took little notice of Li Wenliang's posts, but they were picked up and reposted by a user called 'NoMorePipe' on Taiwan's PTT bulletin board, the country's equivalent of Reddit. When Taiwanese medical officers noticed the posts, far from dismissing them as baseless conjecture, they began health inspections the very next day. 1st of January 2020. The government trusted its citizens and what they had to say, and individual citizens had trusted the government enough to bring the whistleblower's claims to their attention. What better example could there be of an open civil society working transparently and building trust, relying not on state surveillance but on the power of collective intelligence, where everyone in society, no matter where and at what level, is an individual with skin in the game. When I asked Audrey Tang how it is that Taiwan has become such a pioneer in this arena, she pointed to the fact that the country is a very new democracy, only staging its first presidential election as recently as 1996, and that it has therefore been constructed from the start with social technology in mind. Because of that, she says, part of the identity of being Taiwanese is to make constant innovation with technology with the democratic mindset always yielding to the possibility of future novel innovation. She also pointed to the way in which this mindset is encouraged by the country's education system. She says, 'We made a new curriculum that focuses on the competence of the student as a lifelong learner, as well as achieving a common good. Notably lacking is any individual-to-individual competition and any top-down standardized answer that only the teacher holds.' We emphasize that the children, especially when they are 7 or 8 years old, are naturally curious beings, asking a lot of very hard questions about the structural issues concerning our environment, our society, and our economy. In other words, Taiwanese children are not taught to all give the same answer or even to seek the same questions. They are taught to follow their own interests, set their own projects, and find their own solutions. And they are not set up in competition with each other. They are set up to pool their individual talents and to collaborate for the common good. As Tang, with characteristic profundity, states, "If you build your identity alongside individual rankings and competition, then that identity is really false. It is inauthentic because it came from the outside. If you build it from your innate curiosity, and the capability to collaborate, then that belongs truly to you as a person. It's significant, I think, that Tang traces back Taiwan's success as a country to the way it promotes the individual identity of its citizens. Too many governments pursue technology policies that encourage conformity and therefore predictability in the population. Wouldn't it be easier, so the argument goes, to govern a population that largely thinks and acts the same? Why respond to our citizens when we can simply anticipate their every next thought or move? How much less effort would that require? A lot less. How much development cost would that save? A lot more. But the Taiwanese approach shows the benefits that come when governments harness technology to enhance our individuality and encourage our participation, rather than turn us into obedient zombies. And it is with this in mind that we should always be wary as citizens when governments seek to pass legislation without allowing for debate or dissent—even when this legislation is said to be 'for the good of our health'. In fact, especially if it is 'for the good of our health', for as we have seen, actions supposedly necessary for the common good all too often come at the expense of individual liberty. Just as technology gives governments the power to watch us, so too must we watch them.