Michaela Browning: I’m here for a few days because we have our big Google for Taiwan event on Wednesday. Thank you to Deputy Minister Lee especially for all of the partnership on this global first approach to supporting news journalism in Taiwan and tailoring something that is very specific to producing quality journalism, digital transformation, and other things in Taiwan.

Michaela Browning: We’re really excited to be partnering with you. We’re pleased to have the partnership of the publishing industry associations and others. That’s very much due to the important partnership we’ve had with you.

Michaela Browning: I’m excited because, having come from where I’ve come from, I think this is necessary to think about how is the news industry going to transition in a digital age, and we all need it so much. This is a terrific model, hopefully. We can learn from it, and we can get better and better at supporting the news industry because it’s so impotent.

Audrey Tang: Well, Australian people started it off…

Michaela Browning: I actually think that this is a better model.

Michaela Browning: One of the things I’m keen to look at is to be reflective, get your insights, get the industry’s insights, and ours, and we could reflect on how has that made a contribution compared to other models. I think that we’ll see that this is a very intentional, tailored approach to suit the needs that the local industry wants. I hope it would be a good model that we can build on.

Michaela Browning: It’s a learning opportunity.

Audrey Tang: It really is. The situation here in Taiwan also differs a little bit in both time and political climates, compared to the Australian landscape, because here now people are really concerned about synthetic disinformation as caused by certain large language models.

Michaela Browning: We should discuss that. I know you’re such an expert in these areas. I talked to John Deng, and he says that I would have the opportunity to listen to you on quantum and AI, and I’m really keen to have a discussion.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, though, democracy relies on verifiable sources, attributable sources of authenticity. Provenance and contextualization became the most scarce resources in the age of LLM, synthesizing hallucinations.

Audrey Tang: Now, journalism is the art of having provenance, accountable sources. I think journalism takes on even more, I would say, even existential role when it comes to democracy.

Michaela Browning: I think it’s that, but also the work that we do on digital literacy. We have our Grow with Google campaign. Thank you for the government’s partnership. There are so many parts of the ecosystem and education about how we work on learning to live in a digital age, how we digest, find, discover information, and how people bring our own judgment and understanding to it. These are all going to continue to be important.

Michaela Browning: AI can also help us in these sorts of things. I think that this is why we need to develop, as we go, these different kinds of models to see what can work, what can help, not just in terms of news but in content creation, education, and other things so that we can all live in a digital age and have that digital literacy, which we need.

Michaela Browning: On top of the literacy that we need, even without the digital literacy…financial literacy and other sorts of things so that we know how to deal with some of the challenges that have always been there, but they manifest differently in a digital sphere. If you’re dealing with financial scams, you still need financial literacy, but you also need digital literacy.

Michaela Browning: We’ve got to think about how to bring those things together, and there’s so many great areas we can work on. I think that you have been a good supporter of the work that we did with google.org, which is with the Taiwan fact checking center, and I think these sorts of things are going to be hugely important, too. We’d like to build on that with Taiwan, too.

Audrey Tang: Yes. When I say journalism has a kind of existential importance, I mean not just professional journalists who, of course, are very important, but also civic journalists, so people who are competent in digital media, who share their judgments and so on, like my parents. Those were journalists professionally.

Michaela Browning: Yeah, So was my father.

Audrey Tang: Great. Then just yesterday, I helped them to move their browser data from Chrome to Edge…

Michaela Browning: I think we should review that.

Audrey Tang: …so they can try the new Bing Chat, but they immediately noticed that it’s hallucinating.

Audrey Tang: That is to say it was asked to write a plausible blog entry. Of course, it’s a creative partner and all, but it simply starts misquoting things. That is to say, it’s attributing a source, but the source said nothing like its summary said.

Michaela Browning: That was not in the search function? That was in the chat function?

Audrey Tang: Yes, in the sidebar. They were like, “Oh, can we actually fact check this?”

Audrey Tang: So, can we contribute like Twitter community notes, to improve the veracity, the authenticity? From what I understand, Bing Chat doesn’t currently have that. Something like that that collectively fact checks the Web, I think is very important. If Chrome has something like that, we’ll switch back.

Michaela Browning: It’s fantastic that you’ve provided that invitation for us to do so because, obviously, we think that AI is a transformational and a foundational technology. Our CEO has said it’s too important not to regulate it. Google has, from the very beginning, worked on those AI principles to think about how to do this responsibly. We can see why that’s important right now, as there is an increasing focus on large language models and chat applications.

Michaela Browning: It’s to reflect on why Google is thinking so much about the responsible aspects of developing the AI. The potential is transformational. Of course, we also have a lot of machine learning in AI already, of course, which is built into all of your phones and into search and other sorts of things at some levels. This is another level of AI capability with the large language models.

Michaela Browning: There is some extraordinary possibility for scientific discovery, innovation to inspire, empower, inform, but we do have to think about how to do it responsibly. We’re very committed to working with stakeholders and partners and thinking about how to do that.

Michaela Browning: To have somebody like you with your expertise and background thinking about this, we’re excited about the possibility of working with you, and hearing from the Taiwan government, and thinking about what are the opportunities here to look at this because we think about the possibility for AI and in helping us do better for example on accelerating progress on the sustainable development goals. That’s a very real and significant possibility we should be exploring.

Michaela Browning: I’m here, one, to underscore our commitment to Taiwan, hugely important for Google as you know, and we’re so grateful to have the partnership and support of the Taiwan government.

Michaela Browning: Deputy Minister Lee has been terrific for helping us think about how to develop and tailor this news funding announcement which will be announced this Wednesday and that year and a half of deep consultation with all the stakeholders to think about what is a responsible idea here that is tailored to Taiwan circumstances, so we’re excited about that.

Michaela Browning: You’re also responsible for critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, all of these areas that are so important to us. Taiwan is so important for our operations here.

Michaela Browning: We are also invested here in terms of subsea cables and data centers with more on the way and that is important not just for Taiwan, not just for Google, but because it also is important for connection, interoperability and for the Internet for this region, so very important more broadly.

Michaela Browning: Also because this is a place where we can bring hardware and software talent together. This is a place we’re very committed to for the long term. Important for thinking about the design and delivery of some of our products and services, including with AI into the future.

Michaela Browning: I’ve only been at Google for a year and a bit, but I’m hoping to come back more, and think about how we work on some of these exciting areas together.

Michaela Browning: I did want to ask you about the Cybersecurity Management Act, what your ideas and hopes are in that area. In addition to news, what are some things that you would like us to be doing more of? What can we do better? How can we invest more as well in the digital skills in Taiwan? What can we learn from Taiwan to take out to the world? Thank you for having me.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I said publicly that for this year, there are three priorities for the MoDA, our ministry. One, of course, is News Co-prosperity dialogues with digital platforms.

Audrey Tang: The other equally important is communication resilience so that we will work with non geostationary satellite providers to ensure that when submarine cables are cut, which is not hypothetical, it just got cut, the Matsu line. We had to switch to microwave. A few years ago, an earthquake also cut submarine cables, so it’s something that actually happens.

Michaela Browning: That’s right. This is why Google’s investments into sub-sea cables and building that resiliency is so important because this place plays such an important role, not just for Taiwan, but beyond for the Internet. It’s really important.

Audrey Tang: Yes. In communication resilience, we first thank Google for setting the example of setting up the local data centers such that even when the submarine cables are disrupted, we can be sure that our Google Meet and so on still functions even without external connection.

Michaela Browning: Thank you, this is important, Yes.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it wouldn’t consume non-geostationary satellite bandwidth when we just want to coordinate among ourselves. That’s why we use Google Meet instead of some other video conferencing software that has not yet made that commitment.

Michaela Browning: Please reflect on that more broadly.

Audrey Tang: Right. Nowadays, we’re also thinking about the emergency backup and restore situation. As you know, I just visited Lithuania. Both Lithuania and earlier, Estonia, they worked on a similar backup strategy where the cold storage mounted externally and with privacy preserving ways, so only we behold the key and distributed among many cloud providers.

Audrey Tang: We will want to run the drills that if the Google data center, something happens to it, we can actually restore our operations from maybe Australian or Japanese data center.

Michaela Browning: Thank you for sharing your insights and thinking on these things and we are keen to continue to explore them with you. We, of course, not only believe, but know cloud first principles are important for governments and we are advocating on this in APEC this year for example, and continuing to do elsewhere.  We also consider our secure cloud offerings to be the best, and our commitment to infrastructure resilience to be very much about how can we provide the kinds of assurances that people need.

Michaela Browning: Certainly, that governments and others need it when they are looking after the interests of many millions of people.

Audrey Tang: For offering open documents editor that actually works, we used it every day. I think this is very important that the communication resilience is continued development with Google.

Audrey Tang: The third thing that we are coming to this year is to adopt the zero trust network architecture, the ZTA, for especially the communication and authentication of all the, what we call Class A Service Security Management Act Cabinet Authorities, that is to say, the ministries and bureaus that hold the personal data of the entire population.

Audrey Tang: We will start from the 47 or so of these places, switch to very strong FIDO authentication, and so on. This is also something that I know Google pioneered. Actually, Google pioneered the ZTA.

Michaela Browning: That’s right, the zero trust architecture from 2009. Secure by Design is a foundational and driving principle for all our products and services. We do think very much about the importance of distributed cloud, and the fact that data localization, for example, can actually be inconsistent with a lot of the security or governance objectives where sharing data in real time can be important, for example on detecting, sharing information and responding to international financial crimes.

Michaela Browning: We’ve seen examples of that around the world. We’re very keen to talk to you about how we can actually deliver on some of those objectives with you through our products and services. Our secure cloud, for example, we think is world leading.  You will have seen in the last week that,we’ve made an additional quantum milestone announcement.

Michaela Browning: The investment that we are making in quantum, thinking about post quantum encryption, and these things, is part of our enduring commitment to making sure we are at the forefront of cybersecurity enablement in order to continue to provide the assurances that people need, and that certainly, the governments need when they’re thinking about critical infrastructure.

Michaela Browning: We’re very happy to talk in detail about some of these things to demonstrate why, of course, we have a world class suite of offerings in that regard, but also, we understand it’s an ecosystem wide challenge. It’s all from the best emerging technology and being at the frontier of that technology, all the way down to that digital literacy, including for aging populations or vulnerable populations that might have less current digital capacity, for example.

Michaela Browning: That’s a continuous exercise throughout that whole ecosystem, and what can we do to contribute? This is one of the things I’m hoping to hear a bit more about in the next few days. Where do you want us to lean in and do more that’s useful to Taiwan? Including, because we’re so invested here, it’s an investment in ourselves to be thinking about that as well.

Michaela Browning: We’re interested in all of the people who use Google in Taiwan, of course, but it’s also, you can be reassured by the fact that it’s also an investment in ourselves because we’ve got such big commitments here. We need to protect those as well.

Audrey Tang: The Deputy Ministry just earlier today delivered a very comprehensive presentation about how we’re helping the helpers to the elderly people. If you go directly to see, then it’s very difficult actually.

Audrey Tang: There are helpers who can, themselves, maybe in their 50s and so on, who are going to get us in any way, if you make sure that they’re acquainted as a additional ambassador to the even older people they’re taking care of, empowering them with, for example, a service map that they can get more help on, and make matching guarantees so that when they used a website and so on, it is accessible by default, it has universal design.

Audrey Tang: Such standards, I think we’re very committed to work with all the ministries and competent authorities to make it happen. I understand that Google’s design actually has a very strong accessibility component to it.

Michaela Browning: Some of the things I’m really excited about, because I look after the Asia Pacific region is, adding languages to google translate to improve inclusion and diversity, this is important when we think about standard setting and expectations that we also address the digital divide. In terms of standards, we also led the way in secure by design in areas like two factor authentication by default.

Michaela Browning: Build a lot of security into our products and services, but also some of the fantastic advances in languages and software design that we are building in is actually improving accessibility, including for people with disabilities, but also for people with different language proficiencies, including language speaking capacities or education capacities, background.

Michaela Browning: This is one of the areas that we’re very committed to, and it’s actually foundational in the mission statement. If your mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful to everyone, that means you do have to think about everyone. It doesn’t mean everyone’s the same, it means thinking very intentionally about the diversity, and inclusion, and the digital divide and the different context in which various people are living and working.

Audrey Tang: I was just chatting with some friends in OpenAI and recently there’s a contribution for MIT called offsite tuning. That allows us to see nothing of the Google Translate model, or the universal speech model in Hello Google, but nevertheless incorporate the local Taigi, or Hakka, or low resource languages, and so collaboratively tune it.

Audrey Tang: Of course, Facebook already has a speech-to-speech Taigi-English model. It requires a lot of energy to train things from scratch. If we can set up this kind of joint partnership, that is privacy preserving. We have a lot of…including sign language actually. We have 20 national languages, but these are not meant to be shared as raw data to Google or anywhere.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, I think the Google Translate model is not ready to be uploaded to Hugging Face either. By setting up some sort of offsite fine tuning will enable our low resource languages to join the Google Translate and Google Voice Recognition.

Michaela Browning: I look after India and Philippines. We’ve added a number of languages to Google Translate, and you see some of the stories about what that’s enabled. It’s exactly why you get so excited being somebody like me working in a company like Google because you can see how transformational it is.

Michaela Browning: AI and machine learning will help us improve on some of exactly these sorts of…That’s a good potential…

Audrey Tang: Right, it is.

Michaela Browning: That we can do a lot with and use it to help us address some of the digital divide, too.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of cultural and norm alignment that is actually very low hanging fruit, so to speak. A lot of us, when interpellated by legislators, sometimes ask, “Why does Google Translate use this particular Beijing word for this English word?”

Audrey Tang: There’s nothing wrong with it because statistically, the English word is more often combined with that word because the web page count from the Beijing simplified Chinese community is more in both YouTube and on Google search.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if there is a way for a localized fine tuning process, then we can actually easily solve that because that’s what I did before I joined the cabinet, and that was with the Siri team.

Michaela Browning: I know. It’s so exciting to talk to you. One of the things that I did want to think about, and this combines also we’re thinking about news as well, Deputy Minister Lee. YouTube and digital platforms have meant that people that the world hadn’t heard from before have got the capacity to bring their ideas and thoughts to others in an extraordinary way. That is a transformational capability.

Michaela Browning: How can we do more of bringing Taiwanese voices in all its diversity because there’s an extraordinary amount of diversity here…Youtube for example has a mission to give everyone a voice and show them the world, how can we ensure we are bringing Taiwan’s extraordinary contribution here. We want to support that reach and capability. If we’re really serious about inclusion and diversity, that has to be part of the endeavor.

Michaela Browning: If there are ways that we can do more with you on content creation here, including in local language, and thinking culturally about content creation, that’s an important area that we can do more in.

Michaela Browning: Then news launch fund is just one of those areas, but it is an important part. We do need to combine that with the important work that I know we’re working with you on disinformation, fact checking, and literacy. We know that these things have got to go hand in hand.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, all the tools that I mentioned is going to help the local journalists, including civic journalists, so that their reporting spreads wider than disinformation.

Michaela Browning: That’s our hope. We’ve got the news fund announcement. We’re very pleased with all the partnerships that we have with you. We want to do more. We released our economic impact report.

Michaela Browning: I’m sure Anita and the team has told you all our fabulous commitments to Taiwan, but our economic impact report just in terms of the infrastructure commitment here through data centers and subsea cables has been modeled to demonstrate that it’s helping generate 82,000 jobs in Taiwan, $29 billion worth of economic benefits.

Michaela Browning: The reason I mentioned that is just to underline that deep commitment that we’re pleased when we see these sorts of reports because we know that we’re doing something that is meaningful here, and we do want to listen and hear about how we can be more useful in that regard.

Michaela Browning: We’re very excited about the news fund launch. We’re excited that Taiwan is the place that thinks very much about good public policy. It’s no surprise, therefore, that this is a brand new approach to this challenging question. We will learn some things from it and get better.

Michaela Browning: I’m also on the APEC Business Advisory Council, one of the Australian members, there’s three Taiwan members, and we’re working on an AI summit in the digital working group in August as part of this APEC year to think about what are the principles that should be foundational as we develop AI. We’re thinking about quantum computing enablement, so these are the things we can do with you.

Audrey Tang: This, Deputy Minister Lee can share.

Huai-jen Lee: I just wanted to know what difference between Taiwan and Australia you’re providing the funding or negotiated with some of the new sub agency. What are you offer a different policy or strategy?

Michaela Browning: We’re happy to come back to you, and share what are the different models globally if you like because some of the proposals are different. The Australian news code, which has been introduced, involves a review every year about whether you’re designated under the code.

Michaela Browning: It’s a slightly different model, and the Treasury Department ultimately decides whether an entity is designated under the code. The idea is that the encouragement to engage in partnerships discussions with certain publishers.

Michaela Browning: In Taiwan we are already engaged across the industry.  What is unique about this is that together with news publishers here, community stakeholders, the government, and us, we’ve embarked on a year and a half long of consultations to say, “What do you actually think you need in the news industry?”

Michaela Browning: You want to think about how can local news providers in Taiwan digitize, deal with digital transformation, develop the quality news that resonates and lands well. What are the kinds of capabilities that you need? How can we create a sustainable news industry equipped with the skills and capabilities for the digital era.

Michaela Browning: We’re dedicating 300 million Taiwan dollars to a fund that will be administered, not by us, not by us, but by a third party, to assess and administer particular asks from publishers based on the guidelines set by the DTA. In fact, in many ways, we’ll be seeing as the fund is dispersed, how usefully the different ideas that it decides are valuable for publishers and news creators here in Taiwan.

Michaela Browning: How effective are those various initiatives? As we learn which of the initiatives the DTA and publishers action, we will be able to see, together as part of the public private partnerships and cross industry stakeholders, what the impact is and what works effectively.

Michaela Browning: I think it’s actually very different, uniquely tailored to trying to solve the capability gaps or opportunities for Taiwan publishers, and able to evolve. I think it’s quite a different model and quite a thoughtful model. It’s a unique one, and very much tailored to Taiwan’s unique circumstances.

Michaela Browning: Australia’s got a different news publishing industry than Taiwan. You look at media industry regulation in Australia, that’s been about concentration, well before the digital age, and also subscriptions are significant and digital enablement has been different spread across Australia.  In Taiwan government and publisher’s case they are telling us though the last year there is a strong need for local digital enablement and digital audience engagement and reach.

Michaela Browning: You’ve got a real diversity of interests here that we’ve listened to over the course of the last year. This model allows an independent entity to think about how to allocate effectively what those interests think would work well to help them digitize, transform, and develop quality news in a sustainable way for the industry.

Michaela Browning: I’m excited to see where we land and what we learn from this, I think it’s exciting. Personally, I think that this is the sort of model we should be thinking about more generally because it does enable you to think about what other actual problems we’re trying to solve here for readers of news, and to ensure a diversity of news, and a diversity of news for quality news voices.

Audrey Tang: This has a more business development vibe versus a social responsibility vibe.

Michaela Browning: Also, it gives Taiwan the flexibility to think about those things.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Awesome. Anything from our Administration?

Juinn Shiow Lin: I’m from ADI at the Administration for Digital Industries. I think Google has been a good partner for Taiwan especially. I am familiar with data center investment from Google. I think I helped to assist the talking between the government and Google’s, we speak the same language. I can interpret it…

Michaela Browning: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: …to legalese, bureaucratese.

Michaela Browning: Thank you, very much.

Juinn Shiow Lin: We also cooperated with Google since 2018, AI Google Intelligent Taiwan.

Michaela Browning: Google for Taiwan.

Juinn Shiow Lin: Google for Taiwan. Yes. That year I was in IDB, Industrial Development Bureau when I was in IDB partnering with Google for Taiwan events every year. I would like to thank Google for the AI training activities that Google brings to some independent companies. I just want to say Google has been a good partner for Taiwan.

Michaela Browning: Thank you because Anita had reminded me to thank you very much for your partnership. I do think you talk about the data centers, we’re very grateful that we’ve been able to establish data centers here. Taiwan has an important role, not just for Taiwan, with their data centers, serve a broader purpose and play an important role in helping sustain the Internet more broadly than Taiwan.

Michaela Browning: We’re very appreciative of our partnerships in order to make these things possible, so important for our business, but it is more important than just our business.

Audrey Tang: News Co-prosperity planning is held in the cabinet level by Minister Tsung-Tsong Wu with all the relevant ministries. Obviously, Minister Wu found the ADI to be very capable. There’s recently the Minister assigned also ADI to do AI evaluation and interpretability work.

Audrey Tang: It will be the same team trying to figure out whether Google Translate has accustomed to local tuning.

Michaela Browning: Yes. In these areas and as you go along in your important work, where you find things where you think that we can improve or do better, please do talk to us about what the local feedback is that you are receiving that can help us improve our efforts because this is enormously valuable for us.

Audrey Tang: Anything from your colleagues?

Michaela Browning: Yes, please.

Anita Chen: I just wanted to let the Minister and Deputy Minister know that we’ve got all four news publisher associations, the major four ones, they are all attending our event on March 8. It will be a very good event. They have all agreed to say a few words at the event, and then be in photos. I just want to assure you that we have gotten consensus and support from the news publishers.

Anita Chen: This will be good. We’re very excited about this.

Michaela Browning: We’re very excited, and also I think we will be listening and learning from them as we go along. I think that’s what’s exciting about this initiative.

Huai-jen Lee: I still strongly suggest that the four association leaders can speak, give some comments about the event.

Michaela Browning: We will, yes.

Huai-jen Lee: That would be so helpful.

Anita Chen: We will talk to them. I think at least three of them are scheduled to say something.

Michaela Browning: Great.

Huai-jen Lee: That would be good because you remember the last time we see the schedule, they didn’t speak.

Audrey Tang: They are the big news. Like Big Tech, Big News.

Huai-jen Lee: Because the newspaper will report it.

Michaela Browning: Yes, it’s important that the initiative is one that they endorse, and they think is valuable for them. It’s not the only purpose, but it’s a very important purpose, because we also want it to be good for Taiwan and for readers and consumers of news in Taiwan.

Stella Lai: I want to thank the Minister for recognizing Google as a pioneer for zero trust architecture. Regarding your three major focuses this year, we are very honored that we worked with MoDA. From the Cloud team, I want to thank you for being our customers and users of Google Meet, and also our Google Workspace.

Stella Lai: For the resilience project, we work closely with MoDA on POC, and we will be more than glad to lean in to see whatever  you need, and like Michaela said, we are also very keen to know the status of  the Cybersecurity Management Act amendment. If it is what you are planning to do this year, we will be more than glad to join the discussions.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the Cybersecurity Management Act is being planned to take care better of the zero trust architecture, which was not the norm before. Some considered ZTA expensive when the Management Act was first introduced, and I kept telling them Google has been doing this for years.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, then the key to this really is the idea of a public code as public infrastructure. In many other jurisdictions, we have seen that those siloed deployment itself is quite secure. By the way, they exchange data. That becomes the weakest link. It’s quite asymmetric in a bad way.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, you request a lot of resource to defend, but for the attackers, they just need one single zero day in the exchange between the silos, and then goes all your personal data. We’re deploying this idea of T Road, which is a security exchange between all the agencies holding the domestically private data for all citizens.

Audrey Tang: Now, for this secure connection, operationally, the personnel configuring that is of most importance. In addition to introducing FIDO authentication and things like that, the key part of the Cybersecurity Management Act is going to give our administration for cybersecurity a more direct…think of them like ethics officers.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s a specific administration for ethics that is in charge of all the political, ethical offices in all the levels of the government. We probably wouldn’t go that far.

Audrey Tang: Rather, we are focusing on the parts of central government, in the agencies that holds the personal data of the entire country. We would like to work more closely with the personnel that are in charge of cybersecurity. That’s going to be our main focus.

Michaela Browning: Cybersecurity has got three broad component parts. One is the rules and laws and regulations, then you’ve got the products and services that you use, and then you’ve got the people in the system. All three are crucial.

Michaela Browning: We’re very happy to continue to speak to your teams and to share different models on critical infrastructure in cybersecurity, policy frameworks elsewhere, and how our products and services can help meet some of the goals because we think about zero day events and resilience.

Michaela Browning: We have had to think about two-factor authentication and secure by design. If I go through the three different parts, in terms of the rules of the road first. Let me give you and example on cross border data flows, how can you do those securely? How can you do enable data flows that are privacy compliant, consistent ways to have trusted data flows?

Michaela Browning: We’ve been certified under CBPR, Global CBPR. We are also doing things to help others, small businesses certify under CBPR in the US. There might be some opportunities there for example to consider whether the pilot we are doing in the US is applicable here. Then on the products and services, one example is how does our secure cloud work, how does our subsea infrastructure work and contribute, how do these help mean that you don’t have to worry so much about vulnerabilities of users, people, but you can have scalable secure by design products and services where the security is built in and gives the users confidence.

Audrey Tang: As a party to the CBPR, our designated contact for CBPR compliance, the III is also within the Administration’s purview. So not just fixing Google Translate, but also…

Audrey Tang: …the CBPR data privacy and dp.mark and so on. It’s the same team. I think it’s important for you, too.

Michaela Browning: We are interested in how we can be supportive around CBPR and these other things because, in APEC for example.  There is a Digital Policy alert which shows some 1,700 regulations or amendments to regulations on data across the region since January, 2020. That’s hard enough for Google to navigate, let alone a SME.

Michaela Browning: If you are a small business in Taiwan, and this is a trading place, entrepreneurship is in the bloodstream here. How can you navigate that? The compliance costs and administrative complexity are huge, so you need to think about ways to resolve that. Cross border data flows are also crucial for both security and trade.

Michaela Browning: Think about money laundering and criminal syndicates detection and other sorts of things that you need instant time sensitive ability to transfer data if you want to tackle that seriously. That’s my old job, so I think about these things a lot. We’ve got to think about ways to do this together.

Audrey Tang: A lot of the talks that we have here, because we’ll have a GDPR-compliant data protection authority in a year or two… hopefully a year, not two.

Audrey Tang: We try. We made that as our cabinet’s promise to the human rights report to establish by the next year. A lot of the talk are going through the cabinet level, and I’m the cabinet-level CIO.

Audrey Tang: A lot of our work with the administration and with the CBPR work will eventually be subsumed by the new DPA. We want to make sure that the DPA in collaboration with MoDA is not just a agency giving out huge fines, but rather it should be a capacity builder so that it shares the latest and greatest in privacy tech. I have in mind, for example, I’m more connected to the Ethereum and so Tezos world. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That world is even more plural, and there’s a lot more opportunistic scammers in that space. It’s like a maximally adversarial space. In those space, people discovered that really the only way privacy tech can work is for it to be zero knowledge. There’s no privacy budget.

Audrey Tang: Basically you need to conduct a transaction you just mentioned without any additional knowledge by your counterparties about you. They develop a lot of very advanced, like homomorphic encryption, the latest in the privacy tech. In a sense, they are our research labs.

Audrey Tang: We are now bringing a lot of those zero knowledge, including verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers to the MoDA as part of our Democracy Network Department.

Michaela Browning: This is the sort of work that… When I say Taiwan has been so thoughtful about public policy making, this is it.

Michaela Browning: As you are thinking about privacy regulations, and some of these very important work on digital trust markers, and other sorts of identification work, we’d be keen to maintain the conversation about how you strike the balance between enablement and protection and security.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Michaela Browning: Some jurisdictions are developing models, but some of those jurisdictions may not have the digital champions that Taiwan has. They’re not thinking about it from a business, entrepreneurship, enablement, innovation, trading perspective.

Michaela Browning: The trade and innovation can still contribute so much to improve livelihoods and well being. It would be great to be working with you on how to ensure that’s in the mix, too.

Michaela Browning: Some jurisdictions are looking very much at very, very, very protection heavy — which is understandable —. It should be a driver for all of us. How can we also make sure that it’s enabling for business, and trade is important.

Audrey Tang: The business and safety dilemma, the way you put it, was on everyone’s mind during the pandemic in 2020.

Michaela Browning: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It was said that you either do a full lockdown, which is very safe, but your business stops, or you go on as usual and have herd immunity, but then the public safety is in jeopardy.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, I think, and New Zealand, and also Australia, we managed to not just strike a balance, but rather to rely on the ingenuity of collective intelligence and participation, so that people felt that…

Audrey Tang: For example, in Taiwan, contact tracing is done in a zero-knowledge, privacy preserving way, so people volunteered to improve it. Instead of being imposed top down, it’s endorsed by the civic hackers and civic journalists.

Audrey Tang: When there’s participation from, as I mentioned, a lab of people who already solved that in the future, and disseminate that future to solve the dilemma, then the entire society learns something.

Audrey Tang: Then, we don’t have to go to a top-down lockdown, or, in the sense of disinformation, a takedown or shutdown of websites. This is definitely the model that we’re looking forward to.

Michaela Browning: Fantastic. We would certainly like to continue the conversation, and be useful in that regard, and share perspectives on what are responsible regulatory practices that work, that balance all the various, different interests, including…

Michaela Browning: We do know that that secure and trusted interoperability enhances your overall security most often. How do you balance all of the different objectives including public policy making? Taiwan’s very good at thinking about this. We’d certainly like to continue to stay engaged and aware of where you’re at, and… what you’re thinking about. How we evolve our business here accordingly.…

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Michaela Browning: Thank you.