Vaccine conoisseurs
This is one of those weeks when numerous stories update. Australia's dispute over sharing news has spawned deals that are bad for everyone except Facebook, Google, and Rupert Murdoch; the EU is beginning the final stages of formulating the ePrivacy Regulation; the UK awaits its adequacy decision on data protection; 3D printed guns are back; and the arrival of covid vaccines has revived the push for some form of vaccination certificate, which may (or may not) revive governments' desires for digital identities tied to each of us via biometrics and personal data.
To start with Australia: since the lower house of the Australian parliament has passed the law requiring Google and Facebook to negotiate licensing fees with publishers, Facebook began blocking Australian users from sharing "news content" - and the rest of the world from sharing links to Australian publishers - without waiting for final passage. The block is as overbroad as you might expect.
Google has instead announced a three-year deal under which it will pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for the right to showcase it's output - which is almost universally paywalled.
Neither announcement is good news. Google's creates a damaging precedent of paying for links, and small public interest publishers don't benefit - and any publisher that does becomes even more dangerously dependent on the platforms to keep them solvent. On Twitter, Kate Crawford calls Facebook's move deplatforming at scale.
Next, as Glyn Moody helpfully explains, where GDPR protects personal data at rest, the ePrivacy Regulation covers personal data in transit. It has been pending since 2017, when the European Commission published a draft, which the European Parliament then amended. Massive amounts of lobbying and now-resolved internal squabbling over the text within the Council of the EU have finally been resolved so the three legs of this legislative stool can begin negotiations. Moody highlights two areas to watch: provisions exempting metadata from the prohibition on changing use without consent, and the rules regarding cookie walls. As negotiations proceed, however, there may be more.
As a no-longer EU member, the UK will have to actively adopt this new legislation. The UK's motivation to do so is simple: it wants - or should want - an adequacy decision. That is, for data to flow between the UK and the EU, the EU has to agree that the UK's privacy framework matches the EU's. On Tuesday, The Register reported that such a decision is imminent, a small piece of good news for British businesses in the sea of Brexit issues arising since January 1.
The original panic over 3D-printed guns was in 2013, when the US Department of Justice ordered the takedown of Defcad. In 2018, Defcad's owner, Cody Wilson, won his case against the DoJ in a settlement. At the time, 3D-printed plastic guns were too limited to worry about, and even by 2018 3D printing had failed to take off on the consumer level. This week Gizmodo reported that home-printing alarmingly functional automated weapons may now be genuinely possible for someone with the necessary obsession, home equipment, and technical skill.
Finally, ever since the beginning of this pandemic there has been concern that public health would become the vector for vastly expanded permanent surveillance that would be difficult to dislodge later.
The arrival of vaccinations has brought the weird new phenomenon of the vaccine connoisseur. They never heard of mRNA until a couple of months ago, but if you say you've been vaccinated they'll ask which one. And then say something like, "Oh, that's not the best one, is it?" Don't be fussy! If you're offered a vaccination, just take it. Every vaccine should help keep you alive and out of the hospital; like Willie Nelson's plane landings you can walk away from, they're *all* perfect. All will also need updates.
Israel is first up with vaccination certificates, saying that these will be issued to everyone after their second shot. The certificate will exempt them from some of the requirements for testing and isolation associated with visiting public places.
None of the problems surrounding immunity passports (as they were called last spring) has changed. We are still not sure whether the vaccines halt transmission or how long they last, and access is still enormously limited. Certificates will almost certainly be inescapable for international travel, as for other diseases like yellow fever and smallpox. For ordinary society, however, they would be profoundly discriminatory. In agreement on this: Ada Lovelace Institute, Privacy International, Liberty, Germany's ethics council. At The Lancet some researchers suggest they may be useful when we have more data, as does the the Royal Society; others reject them outright.
There is an ancillary concern. Ever since identity papers were withdrawn after the end of World War II, UK governments have repeatedly tried to reintroduce ID cards. The last attempt, which ended in 2010, came close. There is therefore legitimate concern about immunity passports as ID cards, a concern not allayed by the government's policy paper on digital identities, published last week.
What we need is clarity about what problem certificates are intended to solve. Are they intended to allow people who've been vaccinated greater freedom consistent with the lower risks they face and pose? Or is the point "health theater" for businesses? We need answers.
Illustrations: International vaccination certificates (from SimonWaldherr at Wikimedia).
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.