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Writer's pictureVision News

Track and Trace: Two Words You Don't Want To Hear From Any Government


Image by Chris Yang

The UK government are trialing a phone App that it says will track and trace your movements to identify if you've come into contact with someone who thinks they have Covid-19.


Apple and Google who had already designed Apps that would do this, and South Korea's, whose success in beating the virus is attributed to theirs, were all rejected in favour of the NHS developing their own from scratch, leading to questions about why.


At first it was assumed that this was the usual narcissistic stance by NHS managers who have previously rejected any research or innovation as consider all of it 'inferior' to their own, regardless of the company or country of origin. However, it is clear now that the reason for developing their own App is because it differs from those used in other countries. Unlike those that hold the data on your phone, the NHS version stores data centrally, enabling the government to see this data at any time without you knowing.


The Government have tried to reassure the public that they only want the data for "epidemiological reasons" but this has failed to plicate Civil Liberties and Privacy groups. One campaigner telling Vision News "Governments can't be trusted with these sorts of powers, we know they'll misuse them in the end, they always do! Remember when Councils were using the Anti-Terrorism Act to snoop in people's bins? well this could be a thousand times worse."


An App that tracks and traces your movements and identifies who you are associating with is just the latest move in the destruction of civil liberties that has happened at breathtaking speed in 2020. An entire country under house arrest, with Police detaining anyone breaking this new law, has been bolstered by social distancing Apps via council CCTV feeds, and drones flying over open spaces to catch offenders. Now an App on your phone will tell the government who you have come into contact with, an App some are calling the Covid-1984 App.


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