Audrey Tang: evaluation

Transcript context

…A few questions about the pandemic. How much of Taiwan’s success do you think was due to government’s openness, and how much do you think was due to the fact that in Taiwan, standards for privacy are different than in the West, and there’s a certain acceptance of government protocol? Are higher, I’m sure, yes, and more clearly spelled out. First of all, having a clearly-spelled-out perimeter in Taiwan when it comes to privacy and a strong civil right movement that literally fought for those freedoms — and the memories are still fresh — really helps the conversation because anything that tried to encroach on the basic freedoms is immediately met with the counterargument, “Do you want to go back to the martial law? ” or “Do we want to go back to the White Terror?” Of course, the argument would be very strong, and so the people who advocate for less privacy — their argument would be a nonstarter. And so I think it really helps to conserve the societal energy to work with the data that’s already being collected. Just use it in a way creatively to counter the pandemic instead of inventing new ways to collect data, which always has uncertain privacy properties. So I think of course that helps. Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?…

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