Privacy

At this point there had already been more than seven years of information sharing between the government and the public. Trust was high which meant an efficient mass contact tracing programme could be introduced using QR codes. Tang ensured privacy was protected as much as possible by decentralising data, deleting it after 28 days and keeping it out of prosecutors’ hands. Taiwan never went into a full lockdown and, despite its proximity to China, there were only seven deaths from Covid-19 in 2020. This figure rose dramatically after a breakout among airline staff, but by April 2024, it still compared favourably with Britain – 19,005 deaths in Taiwan, 232,112 in the UK, which has a population only three times bigger.