Big Brother is everywhere – and we gave him eyes and ears
The Ministry of Health’s NZ Covid tracer app is ‘‘Big Brother gone mad’’, according to a man whose phone already tracks and relays almost every detail of his life.
‘‘What’s it doing with all with my information?’’ Bryce Dongle, a 37-year-old sales manager, craft brew enthusiast, greyound owner, Crusaders fan, Hoyts visitor and liker of Contact Energy, Bunnings and the Judith Collins Fan Club wrote in an open post on Facebook, a social media platform he has regularly commented on since joining in 2009, without checking his security settings since.
The tracer app is designed to help users keep a digital diary of places they have visited. The information will be stored on their phone and deleted after 31 days, but Dongle remains unconvinced.
‘‘Sure, the Government says we’re in charge of our data, but who knows where it’s really ending up? It’s a slippery slope’’ Dongle wrote, as details of his 9.38pm supermarket purchase last night of a bottle of Bernadino Spumante, a Lynx Africa bodyspray, two cans of whipped cream and a large jar of gherkins were being onsold to several third parties in accordance with the unread terms and conditions of his loyalty card.
‘‘Even the word ‘tracing’ sounds dodgy,’’ Dongle added before tagging himself in a photo taken at the Rowdy Rooster Niteclub then Uber-ing to his home, a permanent materials townhouse on a 430 square metre section which suffered a 2 per cent drop in the latest ratings valuation.
You can see it on Google Streetview; it’s the one with his
Mazda 2 in the driveway.
Dongle ended with a dire warning to the authorities responsible for the app. ‘‘Seriously, this is going to blow up in the Government’s face. People wouldn’t put up with it in America,’’ he declared, as almost instantaneously the GSCB’s textmining software at Waihopai redflagged the words ‘‘blow up’’, ‘‘government’’ and ‘‘America’’ and forwarded a low-level alert to the CIA’s main server in Langley, Virginia.
An anonymous government source whom Stuff hit up for some inside details in exchange for a few cocktails at an appropriately socially distanced bar denied the app was an infringement of people’s rights.
‘‘How it works – can I get another one of these? – how it works is you get to decide if you want to tell the Ministry of Health where you’ve been. Besides if the Government really wanted to extract your personal information, all the really juicy stuff, we’ll just do it by the usual method of – ’’
At this point the lights in the bar went out, there was the sound of scuffling, and when they came back on the source had vanished and a man in a trenchcoat was declaring that the bar was being shut down for ‘‘health reasons’’.
Meanwhile, as at press time, Dongle could not be contacted for further comment as he was asking Siri to navigate him through rushhour traffic while swearing at other drivers, a situation which will later give him cause to wonder why he is receiving ads in his Facebook feed for calmness apps and diazepam.