Let’s hope this app won’t lead to something sinister
IT is not often I find myself sympathetic to the likes of Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce and, even more so, aligned with Tom Tate’s initial frank admission that he was suspicious of the connotations of downloading the Governmenthosted, centralised data base COVID-19 app. Personally, I will not dispute the potential benefits of a tracing app, I will leave that to the experts in their field. However, that is not just medical experts, it is also the tech development companies.
In this day where everyone is deputised to chronicle their own lives through countless social media platforms, in which dystopian social credit systems are the harbinger of the global age of algorithm and where the leaders of the “free” world found it necessary to spy on their own citizens, it pays to be cautious of government assurances as to the use and life cycle of any state sponsored and hosted data base that collates, and maintains, tracking records for a purported period of 21 days. After all, there are alternatives.
The German parliament voted down the use of a similar COVID-19 platform as to what has been promoted and implemented within Australia. However, as pragmatic as they are they are now proposing a system using decentralised architecture similar to that being developed by Apple and Alphabet’s Google, which stores the same information on your handset/smart phone. Now I am no tech genius but it certainly sounds a much less intrusive system all the while ensuring a much greater deal of privacy and denying mass surveillance.
Obviously our government and medical advisers have us all sold on the advantages of “tracing”. It is the model used that has not been debated. The Pan European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) model has been fiercely debated and probably will still be getting debated when the worst of the virus is over, but where was the debate in Australia, where was the alternative offering?
To me it smells like arrogance and a total reliance on the apathy of the Australian populace combined with the “carrot and the stick” approach – the instant gratification society (we will give you back some of your freedom if you download this app).
Since latest reported figures show a download by 1.8 million people in the first 36 hours, it seems that, unlike most developed countries, we have implicit trust in our leadership.
Let us hope it is not misplaced and the trust is not abused by way of merging data sets such as taxes and social security. Moreover, it is not the precursor of other bureaucratic wishlist schemes such as taking cash out of society (we have seen a little of that based on CV19 already), super surveillance facial recognition and, worst of all, a nefarious and perverse digital innovation algorithm-driven system of social compartmentalisation, that could hitherto only be conceived and executed by a Communist regime.
BARRY CUMMINGS, CARRARA