Our (New Zealand) Covid tracing app scans QR codes itself. What jurisdictions are requiring to scan an arbitrary QR code using random apps?
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
I literally can not believe you are arguing it's not better.
Unfortunately very low cases doesn’t mean the virus is gone. Occasionally there is a case and if you want to clamp that down as fast as possible, you need contact tracing. Which means we need to know where you are.
For most people, no extra information is being leaked. Facebook and google already know where they are and they are far more malicious than the AU or NZ government. The tin foil hatters like you can take extra measures I’m sure.
The US has over 25million cases and over 400k dead. That’s literally the entire population of Australia infected. So I’d argue that NZ and AU are objectively better and we shouldn’t worry about “overreach” just yet.
But privacy is clearly one of the victims of this pandemic. At least some countries are now opening up the source-code of the front and back-end of their apps. They had to do that here in Norway (they had to replace the whole app actually) when the original closed source version was demonstrated to contain harmful features...
For most Kiwis this means a bunch of QR code data is stored on their phone and, months or years from now when the emergency is over (depending on how incompetent other countries are) that data is deleted. There is no NZ department of health MySQL database full of geo data of every New Zealand citizen and never will be.
If you're a case (remembering that New Zealand has elimination, so rather than cases being millions of people as in the US for example, they're very rare) then you can choose to help the contact tracers by giving them your data and in that case they do get all the data because you gave it to them. Because New Zealand has elimination contact tracing is something done by a handful of experts.
I would guess that like most countries New Zealand's contact tracing experts worked previously with sexually transmitted infections - so they already understand the sensitivity of this work. COVID-19 is actually less awkward, because at least you don't have to admit to fucking somebody you claim you're not sexually attracted to, just that you were in the same room as them for a period of time.
But of course none of what I wrote above matters much because those are merely facts, and for so many Americans mere facts can't oppose a Truth they have become certain of despite all evidence to the contrary. Not that Mother Nature gives a damn whether you believe her.