Is A Curtailment Of Civil Liberties A Price Worth Paying?

[ToraToraTora]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52401763
I'm not normally a NTH ; NTF person, in this case I think contact apps are a price worth paying. We must be careful though that this does not represent the thin edge of the wedge.

[ToraToraTora]

you're thinking of Nosedive:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/?ref_=ttep_ep1

[albaqwerty]

Surely we're all tracked anyway, smartphone or not.
As has been mentioned, anyone with a mobile phone, cctv and accepting cookies in order to access a website?

Maybe 'they' have found a loop-hole and want the app to close it?

[ToraToraTora]

ssshhh, don't tell OG!

[Theland]

The bible describes this the mark of the beast, unable to buy or sell without it.
As a previous poster said, ''Locked out of society.''

[vulcan42]

\\ We must be careful though that this does not represent the thin edge of the wedge.//
A valid point but once this is up and running, how do we ensure it doesn't get extended and ends up as the proverbial thick edge of the wedge?

[albaqwerty]

I wasn't paying much attention to the commentary on Fox news t'other day, but the gist was about the Patriot Act, introduced after 9/11 and most of it was still in force.
It was, allegedly, only to be in force for a few years but it would appear that the citizens of that free country have either adapted or forgotten.
Might be the same here.

[jno]

alba, my cookies seem (to judge by when I look at something to buy) to think I'm anywhere in a 10-mile radius of my actual position. In London, this means I could be any one of about 5 million people. So at present I'm not being much surveilled.

I don't have a mobile, not because I'm shy but because I'm hard of hearing; but I'm happy without one. I don't really want the government telling me to buy one or spend the rest of my life locked down.

[NickorWan]

Will it operate a bit like the Kevin Bacon game where everyone has a coronavirus number - the degrees of separation from an infected person?

[jno]

good point. It will involve some quite ornate tracking, though.

[BilSuth]

I am not terribly bothered by this because I'm not "up to no good" and in any case there's already a Google App which reminds me every month where I've been and how often.
However, many people will be very unhappy about some aspects of the infection contact-tracing technology.
For example, South Korea has been the model for other countries in controlling Covid-19 spread. They were even able to keep cafes open because of a special mobile app which pings when a coronavirus patient is nearby.
That serves a good purpose, but there have been problems with trolling and victimisation of Covid-infected people -- real, suspected and some utterly false. As a species we are pretty good at this. Think of lepers, and denouncing someone you don't like as a witch. Why? Because that's just what (some) people do.

[tomus42]

I'm gonna go with being alive and under surveillance rather than being dead and left in peace.

[cassa333]

Time barred. Without a never ending extension.

We give our civil liberties up once we can do it again for less and less reason.

[tomus42]

I can't get particularly worked up about this one way or the other. We're tracked and surveilled all over the place anyway. This sentence I'm typing now is being stored on a server to be furnished to the authorities at some point should they ever demand it. It is part of modern life.

[Gromit]

Sadly the The NHS contact tracing app will be a heap of krap and will not work properly. For it to work, it has to be the front open application and not running in the background. But people don’t use their phones like that, so the app will only collect data intermittently. Data needs to be collected all the time, in the background, and the NHS App doesn’t do that.

Germany and France who were ahead of us have already abandoned their own apps are are now working closely with the Google-Apple collaboration (GA). GA have addressed and solved the privacy concerns, will be built into the iOS and Android Operating systems. A third party app produced for Governments will never be as good as Google’s and Apple’s engineers combined effort.

[Spicerack]