Thread by @bopinion

Every country has their own approach to collecting data on the coronavirus – from 🇨🇳China's Confucian authoritarianism to 🇩🇪Germany's post-traumatic technophobia.

But one country stands out above all the others: 🇹🇼Taiwan
bloom.bg/356rmf5

🇺🇸At one extreme, there’s the American approach, which is really just a caricature of Silicon Valley and its idiosyncratic mix of tech-utopianism and libertarianism.

User data is generally assumed to be free by default — for use by the private sector bloom.bg/356rmf5

Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon collect our data to optimize search results or sell better ads.

The government can only have the information if it’s going after crime or terrorism, or something else defined in law, possibly including a virus bloom.bg/356rmf5

🇨🇳Another extreme is the Chinese approach.

Here, even if data is harvested by “private” companies like Alibaba or Tencent, it’s assumed to belong to the state and the party bloom.bg/356rmf5

In China, people’s movements, digital wallets, body temperatures and facial scans can also be mobilized against an epidemic.

But it can also be weaponized by the authorities to clamp down on populations, such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang bloom.bg/356rmf5

🇩🇪Yet another extreme is the German approach.

Here, data is assumed to be inherently dangerous, and thus in need of special protection. Data belongs entirely to the user, who must actively consent whenever anybody, private or public, wants it bloom.bg/356rmf5

The most interesting hybrid information-collecting models are in East Asia.

In South Korea, developers quickly built contact-tracing apps. But the authorities also use footage from CCTV cameras and credit card transactions to track their movements bloom.bg/356rmf5

The most successful data model in the world so far is not South Korea or Singapore but Taiwan.

The whole country voluntarily partnered with the government to create a network of databases in which information flows both from bottom up and top down bloom.bg/356rmf5

To make new online and offline tools for fighting the virus, Taiwan’s "hacktivists," developers and citizens have been collaborating with the government on vTaiwan, a sort of online democracy town hall and brainstorming site bloom.bg/356rmf5

We must remind ourselves that new tools can’t always be voluntary and anonymous.

To contain outbreaks, apps must cover at least 60% of the population; to prevent infections, they must give information that is specific bloom.bg/356rmf5

Other countries should consider Taiwan's approach, if only because the alternatives are worse:

🇺🇸America's model is ultimately elitist
🇨🇳China's model is illiberal
🇩🇪Germany's data angst is paranoid
🇰🇷South Korea's model is too collectivist for the West bloom.bg/356rmf5