I'm coming at this from the perspective of Ontario, Canada.

eHealth, as cumbersome and obtuse as it is, is unquestionably secure. It's not perfect, but it's good enough. We have the IPC (https://www.ipc.on.ca/) and several other checks and balances that must be satisfied before a system can hold health data. Not to mention the federal requirements such as PHIPA.

These safety requirements are completely out the door when some guy runs a vaccine app. This leak wasn't a mishandled CVE or a zero-day - it was just lazy and sloppy design.

Personally, I'm neutral on the technological aspect of 'passports'. I would prefer a hard-copy if possible to keep tech out of the question entirely, but there are absolutely ways to do it well, or at least good enough. This isn't it - this was an opportunist seizing the disorganization of the Alberta government from what I gather.

Slight nitpicks, PHIPA is provincial legislation for health information privacy, and you're likely thinking of FIPPA and MFIPPA as federal.

A passport is going to be a debacle, and there will be leaks like this one and likely worse. If you happened to look at the clerks screen on their tablet when you got your last shot, the vaccination rollout was done using a salesforce app, and it's very likely it didn't go through the same checks and balances (like a privacy impact assessment) as internal govt apps.

IMO, it's got a huge legal problem where it doesn't collect consent in any meaningful way (an anonymous clerk ticks boxes on a screen you can't see, with no way of verifying they have obtained your consent). At least when you sign a physical consent form, you can write-in that you are getting the shot under duress from your employer, but the rollout doesn't track that, and that's by design.

The same can be said for public sector employers collecting vaccine certificate information as a condition of employment (have fun with the unions on that one), as they are also subject to PHIPA, and most of them do not have the facilities for PHIPA compliance in the handling of employee health information (PHI). There are so many technical issues with passports that it's going to be a complete discredit to government, but my impression is they don't actually care. This is a putsch to elevate a class of apparatchiks who do not assert their freedoms or rights, and where they are headed, they don't need legitimacy or credibility.

There is a generation of people in government and other institutions now who are basically terrible people whose plan is to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube in terms of data, "temporary measures," and passing laws that won't withstand court challenges, and they imagine themselves as being muscular about policy. I'd predict it ends very badly for them, and if not for them, then definitely for the rest of us.

One wonders why they think it will work this time.

> The same can be said for public sector employers collecting vaccine certificate information as a condition of employment

Oh, it’s a lot more than the public sector that will be finding themselves to now be health information custodians by collecting this data.

Indeed, being a HIC has a lot of liability. Unfortunately, I think the regulatory institutions and the media are compromised, and I do not forsee any principled resistance based on PHIPA getting traction.

The only way to get traction will be to find a way for it to be used to scapegoat conservative party politicians, otherwise, it's not going to go anywhere. Basically, unless you can pin it all on Doug Ford, the press is going to ignore it.

> and it's very likely it didn't go through the same checks and balances (like a privacy impact assessment) as internal govt apps.

> There is a generation of people in government and other institutions now who are basically terrible people whose plan is to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube in terms of data, "temporary measures," and passing laws that won't withstand court challenges, and they imagine themselves as being muscular about policy.

"Why are you opposing these temporary emergency measures? Are you a conspiracy theorist with something to hide? Flag this one in the system Gladys..."

You didn't even post about the most significant PII loss in USG history - OPM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

No one likes to talk about that one, probably because Russia wasn't involved, and therefore it wouldn't be fashionable to continually harp about it.

What's the alternative? A plastic card in the mail? people are replacing those with apps anyway.

Utilizing zero-knowledge proofs and cryptography so things can be proven without sharing of the underlying data needed for traditional validation.

There has been a lot of progress both in fundamentals and implementations on this front over recent years but even decades old schemes using attestations would have been a huge improvement over “dump and read data through trusted server”.

Here’s a trivial one that anyone could implement without using anything new from the past decade: Whoever stands as “trusted party” could have signing certificates distributed to the verifier-side of the app. They sign hashes of the relevant info. All data sharing needed is once per issuance of “vaccination certificate”. No persistence of PII necessary. If you don’t want to have to disclose PII as part of validation, that’s where the fancier schemes come in.

If you can’t or won’t spend resources to do it properly then yes, physical card is preferred.

This is exactly what Europe does. In a sane world, every country would just adopt the same QR-code standard.

It’s still not great from a privacy perspective. Date of birth, names, and granular details on vaccinations are cleartext, among other things.

It’s not that terrible compared to what’s out there and falls in the “trivial” category (which is not necessarily a negative; less complexity is good) but it’s far from ideal and it’d have to improve before pushing it globally.

The challenge is that the validator sets the rules for who is vaccinated.

As an example, some jurisdictions might declare individuals with single doses protected.

Another real example: the EU is unwilling to accept Covishield vaccinations, despite it being AstraZeneca/Vaxzevria manufactured in India.

The whole point of a vaccine passport is to expose information about your vaccination status to third parties.

I don't see this as any different than carrying around any other ID in my wallet. My driver's license also has my name and date of birth (plus information about my eyesight and home address).

The nice thing about the vaccination passport is that it is like a card in your wallet. There's no centralized server that's being queried. It's offline and distributed.

A verifiable QR-code system where the medium doesn't matter such as the one in Europe. Use a screenshot, print it on paper, doesn't matter.

This is how BC does it. You get a QR code which you can either present on your phone or as a print out.

Manitoba as well.

I can confirm. See my comment upthread about recent trip to Switzerland.

I did all of these things (printed, screenshot, pulled up a webpage) and also had a successful scan of a picture of a QR code that I had in my photoreel (which showed the entire printout, of course, with my name, etc. on it).

That sounds pretty reasonable, yeah.

> What's the alternative? A plastic card in the mail?

Yes. A passport is orders of magnitude harder to forge than for some app written by a random government contractor to leak data.

Europe already has a simple, secure digital vaccine passport. You get a QR code that contains your name, date of birth, and the doses you've received. It's digitally signed by your national government, so that it can't be faked. Nobody needs to hold a centralized database of vaccinated people.

Because it's just a QR code, you can store it however you'd like. If you want, you can print it out and carry it around in your pocket. It's easy to check: you just need to read the information and check that it's digitally signed by a trusted authority (both of these can be done by an app), and check the the person listed in the QR code is the person in front of you (e.g., by asking for an ID).

Except that the digital ones allow frequent invalidation as the commercial and bureaucratic power centers collude.

Not bothering with a movement license (sorry, "vaccine passport") in the first place?

Umm no Vaccine Passport at all...

How about that.

The amount of tyranny people are willing to accept as a response to this is still baffling to me, it is like this is the first time humanity has ever encountered a communicable illness...

This is not the proper way to respond to said illness and does not bode well for the future of individual liberty