About the magazine:

Asian Scientist Magazine is an award-winning science and technology magazine that highlights research and development news stories from Asia to a global audience. Based in Singapore, the print magazine is maintained by a team of professional science and medical journalists, with active contributors from industry and academia. 

About the issue:

In this exciting issue, we set our sights on data privacy—a widely discussed subject in our digitally-enabled world.

While people might have been willing to give up some personal data for the sake of the greater good when it came to COVID-19 trackers (Tracking The Trackers, p. 50), calculating the trade-off between privacy and public health becomes more complicated as governments move towards living with ‘endemic’ COVID-19.

But there may be some technological workarounds. From privacy-preserving technologies (Prioritizing Patient Privacy, p. 30) to precision medicine initiatives (All In The Genes, p. 20), these innovations are able to protect sensitive data through highly secure networks while enabling machine learning algorithms to extract critical information when necessary.

In the future, we might witness further enhanced security in the form of quantum key distribution, a frontier technology that promises to lay the foundations for an ‘unhackable’ quantum internet (Under Quantum Lock And Key, p. 16).