Nonprofit cryptocurrency advancement group Money Center has appealed to the community to develop tech-based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic that protect civil liberties and privacy.

In a post published on Apr 8, the middle's director of enquiry, Peter Van Valkenburgh, surveyed recent proposals from the Zcash Foundation for Private Contact Tracing Protocols, as well as progress with Decentralized Identifiers by Microsoft Research.

"It'south our duty equally a community of technologists to be vigilant against the imposition of tracing and identity technologies that could, long term, jeopardize our autonomy and privacy," Van Valkenburgh wrote.

Resisting state overreach

Coin Center warns against the pandemic response of the Chinese authorities, which solicits information on users of Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba'south WePay for use in the state's contact tracing and immunity passporting. This aforementioned engineering, it is claimed, is as used for the surveillance of citizens' behavior and a clampdown on dissidents' freedoms.

While Republic of korea, similar China, has drawn on land-run GPS tracking and data harvesting that is mandatory for all citizens, Singapore has used a centralized directory of phones, implementing Bluetooth technology to track movements in real-time.

Van Valkenburgh draws an obviously hard-and-fast line between presumably open societies in the West and the examples he gives in Asia. Yet whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden have this calendar week stepped in to warn of post-pandemic surveillance creep in the Usa, likely to compound the intelligence agencies' existing overreach throughout the 2022s.

Fit for purpose

Dissimilar all these approaches, blockchain protocols for decentralized and anonymized contact tracing can safeguard privacy and freedoms against governments or corporations.

The Zcash Foundation, which is collaborating with projects such every bit the CEN Protocol (initiated by CoEpi and Covid-Watch) and DP-3T is calling on the community to jointly develop a shared, open protocol for privacy-preserving contact tracing that could be used on billions of user devices.

Meanwhile, a proof-of-immunity decentralized identity scheme would need to exist significantly more than complex than systems such equally Bitcoin and could look to Decentralized Identifiers as a blueprint for a passporting tool that would offer meaningful command for individual users.

Cointelegraph has recently reported on blockchain platforms such as MiPasa, developed in partnership with Oracle and Microsoft, that are focusing efforts on solving the lack of integrated, verified information sources for coordinated responses to COVID-19.

Alongside decentralized identifiers, privacy-respecting tools such as zip-knowledge proofs have also been used past the blockchain security company Hacera to allow data to be shared between different entities without revealing sensitive medical information.