Zoom has reversed its controversial decision to restrict access to end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for some users and will now offer the feature to customers of both its free and premium services.

The video conferencing app said it had consulted with rights groups, child safety advocates, government representatives, encryption experts, and its security council to gather feedback.

“We are also pleased to share that we have identified a path forward that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users on our platform,” the firm’s CEO Eric Yuan said in a recent blog post.
“This will enable us to offer E2EE as an advanced add-on feature for all of our users around the globe – free and paid – while maintaining the ability to prevent and fight abuse on our platform.”

Users of the free service will be required to authenticate in a one-off process with information such as their phone number, for the platform to “reduce the mass creation of abusive accounts,” Yuan added.

The news came as rights groups, tech firms, and internet users petitioned the firm to reverse its policy on E2EE.

They argued that E2EE is too essential to be a premium feature, especially in the context of global protests against racial injustice and government oppression. The technology protects activists, journalists, and other vulnerable parts of the population from government repression and surveillance, as well as from cyber-criminals, they said.

Mozilla welcomed the news. The tech non-profit, which wrote an open letter to Zoom earlier in the week signed by tens of thousands of internet users, argued that E2EE should always be the default setting, not a luxury.

“We’re heartened that Zoom listened to consumers, especially at a time when millions of people are relying on the platform to stay connected amid the pandemic and to organize in support of Black lives,” it said in a statement.
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“Zoom’s decision is part of an emerging trend: Consumers are demanding more of the technology products and services they use every day. And companies are changing their products to meet these demands.”

From predicting outbreaks to devising treatments, doctors are turning to AI to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why It Matters. While machine learning algorithms were already becoming a part of health care, COVID-19 is likely to accelerate their adoption. But lack of data and testing time could hinder their effectiveness – for this pandemic, at least.

What's Happening. With millions of cases and outbreaks in every corner of the world, speed is of the essence when it comes to diagnosing and treating COVID-19. So it's no surprise doctors were quick to employ AI tools to get ahead of what could be the worst pandemic in a century.

• HealthMap, a web service run by Boston Children's Hospital that uses AI to scan social media and other reports for signals of disease outbreaks, spotted some of the first signs of what would become the COVID-19 outbreak. This was days before the WHO formally alerted the rest of the world.
• Early in the epidemic, the Chinese tech company Alibaba released an AI algorithm that uses CT scans of possible coronavirus patients and can diagnose cases automatically in a matter of seconds.
• In New York, Mount Sinai Health System and NYU Langone Health have developed AI algorithms that can predict whether a COVID-19 patient is likely to suffer adverse events soon and determine when patients will be ready to be discharged. Such systems can help overburdened hospitals better manage the flow of supplies and personnel during a medical crisis. 

The Big Picture. Even before COVID-19, AI was already becoming a more significant part of modern health care. Nearly $2 billion was invested in companies involved in health care AI in 2019, and in the first quarter of 2020, investments hit $635 million – more than four times the amount seen in the same period of 2019, according to digital health technology funder Rock Health.

• The advance of AI is partially a result of the rapid increase in data, the lifeblood of any machine learning system. The amount of medical data in the world is estimated to double every two months.
• Engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis told Wired an estimated 200 million physicians, scientists, technologists, and engineers are now working on COVID-19, generating and sharing data "with transparency and at speeds we've never seen before."
• "We understand who is at risk and how they're at risk, and then we can get the right treatment to them," says Zeeshan Syed, the CEO of Health[at]Scale, an AI health care startup.

In Trials. AI has demonstrated in recent trials a decent record of success, especially when it comes to rapidly diagnosing COVID-19 by interpreting medical scans.

• A study published in Nature Medicine in May found an AI system was more accurate than a radiologist in diagnosing COVID-19 patients using CT scans – X-ray images of lungs – combined with clinical symptoms. 
• A systematic review of preprint and published studies of AI diagnostic systems for COVID-19 published in the British Medical Journal in April noted the models reported "good to excellent predictive performance." However, they cautioned the data was still limited for real-world applications and at high risk for bias.

The Catch. That's the perennial challenge for AI systems in any field. Experts worry models that perform well in an experiment may not be able to replicate that success in a hospital under stress.

• "There is a lot of promise in using algorithms, but the data in the biomedical space can be really difficult to deal with," says Gabe Musso, the chief science officer at BioSymetrics. This biomedical AI company uses machine learning for simulation-based drug discovery. Genetic data, imaging data, and data from electronic health records are often unstructured and rarely share a common format, complicating efforts to feed the information into an algorithm.
• Many of the AI diagnostic systems being rushed into the fight against COVID-19 were developed before the pandemic and thus were trained on other respiratory diseases like tuberculosis. That reduces their accuracy – especially if their training datasets don't match the gender or age of typical COVID-19 patients.
• As a result, pioneering computer scientist Kai-fu Lee wrote recently, "I would give [AI] a B-minus at best" for its performance during the pandemic.

The Bottom Line. As both the size and quality of medical data on COVID-19 improves, so should the AI systems that draw from it. But that will take time.

The very first contact tracing app powered by Google and Apple's exposure notification APIs has gone live in Switzerland.

As announced on Twitter by EPFL yesterday, 'SwissCovid' is now undertaking a large scale pilot, with hopes that it will pave the way for public availability by mid-June.

As of today, employees at @EPFL, @ETH_en, @vbs_ddps, and some hospitals and cantonal administrations can download the digital proximity tracing application #SwissCovid. This large-scale pilot paves the way for public availability by mid-June. https://t.co/E9hl43g8Ca #COVID19 #DP3T

In an announcement the institute stated:

Several thousand people in Switzerland can now download "SwissCovid," the official application for tracing contacts at risk of transmission of COVID-19 if they wish. "This is the first time that the operating system updates from Google and Apple enable its deployment and testing on such a large scale," says Professor Edouard Bugnion, Vice-President for Information Systems at EPFL. He was at the heart of discussions with Google and Apple to have them adopt the "DP3T" protocol led by the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology. Alfredo Sanchez, project manager, notes that "this gives great responsibility to the Swiss testers, as many other countries intend to adopt the same protocol later on."

One important footnote is that while the pilot is ongoing, the Swiss parliament will deliberate revisions to the law on epidemics. MPs must debate and approve the scheme before it is offered to the public, however recent research has suggested that as many as 70% of Swiss residents support the program.

This is the first large-scale testing of an app that uses Apple and Google's exposure notification technology. As per the two companies' stipulations, the operation is also decentralized:
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SwissCovid operates in a "decentralized" way, which means that the operations that are essential from a privacy point of view are not carried out on a centralized server, but on each phone. The app uses Bluetooth to exchange and record the ephemeral proximity identifiers of other phones in the vicinity. These identifiers are kept on the phone unless a person is tested positive for COVID-19. In that case, their doctor will give them a single-use code that allows them to voluntarily share the ephemeral keys on their own phone that correspond to the days when the person was contagious. These keys are sent to a server managed by the Swiss administration.

The potential jurors popped onto the screen one by one. They confirmed their names and told the judge how they were connecting to the court: on laptops, tablets, and iPhones.

There were some wireless issues and camera problems. Still, eventually, 26 Texans in separate boxes raised their hands for the judge and together swore the juror’s oath, beginning the experiment of conducting a civil jury trial entirely over Zoom.

The coronavirus pandemic has crippled courts nationwide, putting many cases on indefinite hold and leaving judges trying to manage some hearings via videoconferencing. The delays have kept some defendants in jail longer, exposing them to possible outbreaks. And the virus even upended how the Supreme Court operates, with the justices hearing oral arguments by phone for the first time in the court’s history.

The test jury-trial-by-video that was held in suburban Dallas recently could reveal a possible path forward in which jurors are kept safely distanced. At the same time, cases are allowed to proceed until the coronavirus threat has receded enough to resume some semblance of normal life.

It also raises complex questions about security, a person’s right to a fair trial, and whether virtual deliberation might prevent 12 people from forming the bonds needed to hash out justice.

“No one is saying tomorrow we’re going to start trying serious felonies over Zoom,” said District Judge Emily Miskel, who coordinated the technology for the trial. “But I think there are many civil trials where parties might agree that this is a good way to resolve it given the uncertainty of when you’re ever going to get an in-person civil jury trial.”

The Collin County court held the so-called summary trial – a one-day civil proceeding with a non-binding verdict – on Monday as an experiment in restarting parts of the justice system that ground to a halt because of the coronavirus. It was over a disputed insurance claim that was originally set to be heard in-person in March. According to the National Center for State Courts, which has tracked court functions during the pandemic, it’s the first remote jury trial ever in the United States.

Those involved seemed pleased with the process.

Jury selection was streamed live on YouTube, but most of the rest was private because summary trials are confidential civil proceedings meant to give the parties the option of settling before an actual trial.

During jury selection, lawyers for both sides asked people on the call to raise their hands in response to questions about potential bias. When a hand popped onto the screen, the lawyers would ask follow-ups or note the juror’s number.

Matthew Pearson, a San Antonio lawyer for the plaintiff, said the comfort of their homes seemed to make the jurors more responsive to questions. They were attentive as he presented evidence by sharing his computer screen over Zoom, Pearson said, and his firm saved money because it didn’t have to fly in an expert witness from Minneapolis.

“Overall, it was a better experience than I was expecting,” he said.

Deliberation proved a little more tricky.

The jurors were broken into two groups of six and put in separate virtual rooms where they could talk privately and look at the evidence in Dropbox folders. They ultimately returned two verdicts meant to give the parties more information to assess whether to go to trial.

At one point, things were delayed a few minutes when a juror who’d stepped away to make a phone call during a break couldn’t hear the judge calling him back to his computer. The same type of thing happens in the courthouse, Keith Dean, the retired judge who presided over the trial, told the others.

Miskel, the other judge, joined the deliberation “rooms” a few times to help jurors access evidence, which she said would normally cause attorneys to “freak out.” Typically, jurors send notes asking the judge for help, and a member of the staff goes into the jury room with pieces of evidence.

But lawyers worry that virtual deliberation cuts out the casual interaction among jurors that some see as essential to building group trust. And defense attorneys are especially skeptical of e-court for criminal cases, where they already struggle to speak privately with their clients during routine hearings held remotely.

“It would just be too difficult, too many constitutional hurdles to clear for a defendant to be brought to a virtual trial,” said Randy Gioia of Massachusetts’ public defender agency. “There is no substitute for an in-person, face-to-face three dimensional hearing with a judge.”

Security is a concern too. As tens of millions of people have turned to video conferencing to stay connected during the pandemic, hackers have derailed many calls with threats, bigoted comments, and pornographic images.

If more courts turn to video trials, ensuring people with poor or no wireless could serve as jurors would also be a challenge. Rare cases that require juries to be sequestered might have to take place in-person.

Even when cases do return to the courthouse, the virus may have changed things. Cross examinations will be different if attorneys and witnesses are wearing masks. And Miskel suggested courts might blend in-person and online – doing trials over video but bringing jurors to court to deliberate.

Dean reminded jurors at the start of the proceedings that the online setting made their duties no less important.
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“The courthouse came to you,” he said.