HYPPO
In response to Covid-19, countries developed tracing apps to determine the chain of infection [1]. Organizations like Human Rights Watch [2] raised concerns regarding surveillance [3], discrimination and abuse of power.
Currently, we are faced with US protests fighting racism. On 2020/06/02, the first news got public about the usage of Corona tracing apps to track protestors by Minnesotas officials [4].
HYPPO is an anonymity and privacy preserving data collecting protocol for devices. Faced with climate change and pollution we will need more data to prevent serious health events, but we also have to take care that this data can be not abused by people in power.
It's technology bases on the Tor protocol [5] and PrivCount [6], a differential privacy concept for privacy preserving collecting of data, like it is done by Tor's metrics [7].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/t...
[4] https://bgr.com/2020/05/30/min...
[5] https://gitweb.torproject.org/...
The WHO mentioned evironmental risk factors like drinking-water services and air pollutions level in their Global Reference List of 100 Core Health Indicators [1] [2]. Our health is inseparably connected to the health of our planet. We observe an increasing of risky problems caused by climate change [3] [4], pollution.
Smartphones have reached a broader distribution [5]. The diversity of smartphone sensor technologies, their quality have raised rapidly and can be used for live monitoring of environmental parameters [6].
This gives us a global, grounded, live system for data collection for scientific and early warning system for environmental events. Facing rising global environmental problems, pollution, climate change, we need global solutions and event driven disaster management [7] [8].
Regarding Covid-19, tracing apps, combined with political events, protests and the danger of abuse of power by tracking protestors [9], we have to take care not giving this power in the hand of governments.
We have to take responsibility now. Develope the necessary technologies and implement them before other ones, without this warranties for anonymity and privacy, get established and can't be replaced, anymore.
[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bits...
[2] https://www.who.int/healthinfo...
[3] https://thespinoff.co.nz/scien...
[4] https://www.scientificamerican...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
[6] https://www.researchgate.net/p...
[7] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/do...
HYPPO is a software protocol standard for decentralized, privacy preserving data collection by mobile devices, using differential privacy. Running as daemon in the background of the operation system, it collects data given by the mobile phone sensors and forwards them, by taking care of privacy standards, to several severs where the results can be taken and used by the public, researchers and health monitoring institutions.
It's technology based on a derivation of the Tor protocol [1], an online anonymity network (https://www.torproject.org/about/history/) and Tor's privacy preserving data collection of participating network relays by using PrivCount [2], a differential privacy design, as part of their metrics project (https://metrics.torproject.org/). Additional research results like given by the Harvard Privacy Tool Project (https://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/differential-privacy) and from Blockchain technology research are also considered to improve the concept, the necessary requirements and also possible contraints, for the given problem statement.
“Pollution is one of the great existential challenges of the [human-dominated] Anthropocene era,” concluded the authors of the Commission on Pollution and Health, ... “Pollution endangers the stability of the Earth’s support systems and threatens the continuing survival of human societies.”’ [1].
In next decades, it will be necessary to find more efficient ways of environmental parameter monitoring worldwide to detect serious health risks. We can expect, that one way, will be given by the rising distribution of smartphones and their sensor technologies. We have to use this possibility to stay stafe regarding dangerous environmental problems. We have to think how we can use these technologies in a secure way, with taking care for data protection and anonymity.
HYPPO is considered to become an online standard protocol for safety decentralized data collection by smartphones, worldwide, running in the background of the operation system. It will serve everbody who uses a smartphone, taking care that the owners data still keeps safe.
Researcher from around the world, get the possibility to work with this data to improve their work.
Governments get the possibility to get warned regarding health risking events, without getting the power to abuse data against people.
New technologies, their distribution give us possibilities for tracking pollution, in a farther away future maybe detecting viruses, just by the sensors of a mobile phone, monitoring the spread of emerging outbreaks and useful data sets for researchers.
A protocol which keeps safe the individual data, is not only necessary for present. It is even more important for the future, to be able to use the newest sensor detection, data collecting technologie for good. Keep people safe for health risk, but not put them in risk that their data could used to restrict their human rights, at the same time.
- Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model
- A new application of an existing technology
1. First privacy preserving online protocol for decentralized environmental data collecting for mobile devices, at all. => Strong data protection of citizens regarding possible abuse by governments, companies or other parties in charge.
- The most scientific puplications focus on saving already collected data decentralized respectively, the decentralized sharing and analysing of this data.
- Furthermore, companies like Google already collect a lot of data from their users, including users of Android itself, but don't care about real privacy, since this would be in contrast to their business model which based on personalized data and is the contrast to the concept of our project which wants to do a depersonalization of information.
2. Results in the first privacy preserving, earth grounded, global monitoring system for environmental data, on the long term. => Data for new research possibilities for scientists and possiblity for (live) monitoring and detection of possible health security events
- Already existing environmental data collection happen ground based on fixed measurements stations, mostly not connected to any larger network, or happen satellite based.
1. Main technology is Tor [1], a well known anonymity network [2]. It uses the concept of 'Onion Routing'. All data is forwarded from the user to the final server, through three, so called tor nodes. The first node gets the data from the user, sends it to the second node and the second node sends it to the third which finally sends the data to the server. In each step the data is encrypted and each nodes only knows its direct precursor and direct successor but not the whole chain. In this way, the user can access a website anonymized, since the server only sees the third node ip, but not the ip of the user itself.
2. Tor is maintained by Tor project, a US non-profit. It also includes a part, called 'metrics' which collects anonymized information regarding the contributing Tor nodes of the network (bandwidths, number of users, ...) . For the collection of certain sets of data, a safety measurement method 'PrivCount' [3] [4] was introduced. It uses Differential Privacy and collect aggregated statistics without exposing the statistics of a single node. A single dataset (added with noise) is parted and sended to several reporters. Only all together are able to reconstruct the information again but without leaking single node information.
3. We use a Tor, PrivCount derivation as background protocol to collect sensor data and send them to central servers for research and health risk monitoring purposes.
[1] https://www.torproject.org/abo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
[3] https://www.ohmygodel.com/publ...
[4] https://gitweb.torproject.org/...
Decentralized technologies [1] and anonymity networks in general are a hot topic in computer science research. Tor (https://www.torproject.org/about/history/) in particular, is a well known established anonymity network [2][3]. The mentioned differential privacy concept of PrivCount [4][5][6] was discussed and implemented into Tor's metrics (https://metrics.torproject.org/) already some years ago. Differential privacy in general is widely discussed research topic by known institutions [7].
[1] https://www.csail.mit.edu/rese...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
[3] https://www.freehaven.net/anon...
[4] https://gitweb.torproject.org/...
[5] https://github.com/privcount/p...
- Imaging and Sensor Technology
- Software and Mobile Applications
Privacy becomes important if we looking at the political developments. History showed us that information can be a powerful tool in the hands of people for discrimination and prosecution like it happened in Nazi Germany, only base on few information (name, address, religion) collected by a census, few years before.
Anonymity and privacy preserving technologies are already a broad research topic and in practical usage. But until now, no really privacy preserving based concept for decentralized environmental data collecting for mobile device has been published. Current smartphone sensor hardware still don't have the neccessary range of kinds of parameters. The aim of this project is not to solve a short term problem, its aim is to solve a long term problem, with which we will confronted in the future, when sensor data collecting by smartphones will be a serious thing regarding health secruity monitoring.
Additionally, it will offer, for the first time in history, a real broad, ground based, global environment monitoring system, when environmental data collection by mobile devices will have reached a critical acceptance and distribution.
- 3. Good Health and Well-Being
- 13. Climate Action
- 16. Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
- Germany
At the moment, it's in developing.
The first, test introduction, will be done by an app version, and hence serve serveral thousand test people who are willing to participate.
Long term (five years or longer), in the best outcome of beeing accepted as established privacy preserving protocol as background daemon (it will run independently in the system background used by every app, and will be no longer a solitary app), it will serve everybody who owns a smartphone.
1. Short term goals
- Getting professional (academic, research) people on board for finalizing design questions and implementation.
- Establishing the necessary contacts regarding company connections for long term coworking and implementation as background daemon protocol.
2. One - two year goals
- Getting established a test app version for a certain set of environment data collection, with a certain amount of test users.
- Getting established this app version of collecting protocol for a certain set of environment data, for real live users. => Getting first data sets from this for health and environmental research => Reviewing results of app usage and collecting results => Discussion and implementation of necessary revisions
=> Impact: The final result of this small app version test, would be a test of the concept in real live and getting first environmental data for research and health institutions, by protecting privacy of users, at the same time.
3. Five and more years goals
- Establishing useful concept with health organizations for defining the necessary set of information for research and environment monitoring regarding health security and connecting it with protocol
- Moving from app version to background daemon, getting it established as protocol
=> Impact: Full available for privacy preserving environmental data collection for research and health security events
- Establishing the academic research connections which are necessary to take care that the final protocol design really satisfies the mentioned properties.
- Convince the responsible companies of established operation systems of the necessity of this protocol for getting it part of their system.
Participate in events like Solve to get the necessary attention and possibilities for contacts.
My current possibilites for both of this points are very limited.
Both points are crucial for the success of this project. Without attention and scientific support as well as company contacts it's difficult to get it technical save and also to get it established in systems.
- Not registered as any organization
Currently only me (1). Full-time. This is one project of several I work on, at the moment.
For several years, I have worked as an independent mathematical researcher (currently freelancer) on designing a new kind of censorship free, access to knowledge warranty, privacy and anonymity preserving internet by a mathematical computer science approach for distributed network structures and protocols as well as algorithms, combinatorics and optimization.
Additionally, I have volunteered on open source projects around this topics with coding as well as fundraising, giving trainings, outreach, documentation and support questions and tasks.
Since 2016, I volunteer on Tor project and in 2017, I contributed with theoretical work to the PrivCount implementation into Tor.
My main motivation is driven by personal experiences of abuse of power of information which brought me to this topics. From former jobs and internships, I also know the perspective of researchers of other disciplince with their needs around data and its collection for research purposes.
You can find more about me and my work on my website:
https://research.carolin-zoebelein.de/
None for this particular project.
1. Intended as non-profit organization in cooperation with academic institutions for further development and research regarding data usage as well as companies for system integration => Revenue by research grants and indirectly through the company cooperations
2. Results of research regarding the protocol, its implementation, the collected data and the research results regarding the data, all have to be make accessible for everybody, published under free licenses and has to be open source on public servers => Can be used by everybody ('ordinary' people, researchers, companies,....) for software developments, security event monitoring and management, and research in online privacy as well as health security and emergency event management
3. Impact and benefit for citizens: Protecting their privacy and safe them for health security events.
- Organizations (B2B)
Since, this is mainly an academic orientated work, it's intend to raise money by grants.
The project is predestined as a academic research project at an institution with the appropriate research infrastructure, topics and groups. MIT has this with its Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) connectd with Havard University's Privacy Tools Project [1][2].
I personally, even working as a researcher, don't have any institution affiliation which is mandatory to get this project alive as well to get the necessary acceptance by people in charge. MIT has this possibilites, just because it's MIT :).
- Solution technology
- Product/service distribution
- Board members or advisors
- Monitoring and evaluation
1. Solution technology:
Academic research support from MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) together with Havard University's Privacy Tools Project [1][2].
2. Product/service distribution:
Creating contacts to companies in charge regarding common development and for integration in smartphone/mobile device operation systems and technologies.
3. Board members or advisors
Helping with finding board of trust members and advisors, for getting the necessary reliability.
4. Monitoring and evalution
Helping with contacts to necessary organizations and concepts for establishmend of a 'review loop' regarding protocol development, security and privacy risk concens and critical points as well as from researchers who uses the collected data, to prevent wrong doings, bugs, security failures, ...., and misshanding of data.
MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) together with Havard University's Privacy Tools Project [1][2] for further academic research work of the given project.
In general, with health and environmental researchers to define the necessary set of parameters which should be collected.
In general, MIT as known institution for establishing of the final result.
[1] https://privacytools.seas.harv...
[2] https://privacytools.seas.harv...
Privacy becomes important if we looking at the political developments. History showed us that information can be a powerful tool in the hands of people for discrimination and prosecution like it happened in Nazi Germany, only base on few information (name, address, religion) collected by a census, few years before.
I made experiences which showed me the importance of this topic. I started to contribute to open source projects and finally research in this area.
We have to stop to think short term, if we talk about technology developments. We have to think long term, what kind of developments will appear and be used for good things, which dangers could come with them, trying to develope the solutions for this already today, not just if the problems are already here.
Until now, no really privacy preserving based concept for decentralized environmental data collecting for mobile device has been published. Current smartphone sensor hardware still don't have the neccessary range of kinds of parameters. The aim of this project is not to solve a short term problem, its aim is to solve a long term problem, with which we will confronted in the future, when sensor data collecting by smartphones will be a serious thing regarding health secruity monitoring.
Privacy and anonymity tools have proved to be working and being scalable naturally by their acceptance which needs the establishment of a trustworthy and reliable concept for people, only given by as much as possible (financial) independence from company support as possible.
