Too good to give up

Drastic times call for drastic measures.

But what happens when the drastic times end? Obviously, the drastic measures should, too.

But it doesn’t always work out that way. Often, governments and government agencies get a taste for new powers, and never give them up.

Income tax is a good example: introduced in 1917 to help finance the costs of the First World War, it was supposed to be temporary. “I have placed no time limit upon this measure … a year or two after the war is over, the measure should be reviewed,” said Sir Thomas White, then Canada’s federal minister of finance.

It turned out that the sweet, sweet revenue was too tasty to give up.

But it’s not the only example.

And that brings us to the current COVID-19 pandemic and the question of whether we should allow an app to have access to location data from our cellphones in an effort to allow public health officials to track the possible contacts of people who have carried the virus.

“We think we can have something up and running within a couple of weeks,” Health Minister Dr. John Haggie said Monday.

The system would be voluntary, notify users if they may have been near someone who had been in contact with the virus, and would only unlock data that the user allows — but that data would include the user’s contact list.

So, use it and just delete the app later?

Think income tax. And, as we’ve seen in the recent past, things don’t always disappear from your devices the way you think they will.

And it’s not only governments that end up wielding what you might be thinking is your personal information.

Big tech is fond of telling you that you can turn off location tracking on your phone, yet apps like Facebook have been caught out in the past tracking individuals who thought they had turned location tracking off completely.

The irony is that there’s such a sheer lack of knowledge about how much tracking is already done. It’s tracking that you often agree to in the voluminous legalese you agree with when you sign up for some web-based service or latest app.

(It leads to some hilarious scenes. A woman in a recent COVID-19 lockdown protest in the United States was videoing herself on an iphone as she complained to the news media about governments inserting tracking chips in people through vaccines — while waving around the tracking chip in her hand.)

Apple and Google have said they plan to add new software to their phones that could do pretty much what Haggie is talking about — using Bluetooth wireless to map when individuals come close to someone later identified as a carrier.

Everyone says privacy and security are crucial elements of the plan.

But let’s see how tempting the information ends up being after the fact.