Still doesn't excuse being iOS-only, though.
Is the Aus Gov able to do this to simply because it is not a corporation? as per http://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/cons...
The fact that its now further embedded in an app. owned by international conglomerates is hardly suprising. They're slowly losing what control they had.
Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology. There are too many things understood by too few people for sensible decisions to be made, let alone worrying about do these things age well and just add to the behemoth of red tape^H^H^H^H digital bureaucratic cloud storage.
Paper systems didn't have these problems (although they certainly had some disadvantages).
The ACCC is one of Australia's few good independent bodies, but pretty much all of the others have had their funding greatly reduced over time. Whatever good ideas they come up with just get ignored a lot of the time, because corruption pays and ineptitude is normalised. The financial watchdog is basically toothless at this point.
The Robodebt scheme [1] is just one of their recent screwups. Interestingly, there's now something similar that's come to light regarding Post Office budgets in the UK from a few decades ago.
- I moved to Australia about 4 years ago. I'm pretty convinced that the Australian Gov is much ahead in regards to tech adoption compared to most places in EU and US. In my 4+ years in Oz, I had to visit an offline institution exactly 3 times (you can do almost everything online). Everything's been flawless, super easy and very well integrated - from procuring various docs to submitting a tax return.
- Yes, we can always find something that could be improved; however, if you compare how things are run in Oz to most other countries, you will find out it's much ahead.
I got stuck in a bureaucratic loop because an OCR reader interpreted a 0 as an 8. The fact that the automated process changed status and started throwing more forms at me, even though none it makes sense in context. Just because it was programmed that way. I still get them. Filling in forms with 0's is easier than dealing with people who insist I should be getting them in the first place (one person worked out what had happened, but transferred me to another department to get it fixed where I inevitably had the internal phone system fail and hang up on me. The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again.
These things should happen less when human judgement is involved rather than cause-effect programming.
You may be right though - I can't speak for many overseas systems.
I did also get stuck in the UK tax system. They were sending me threatening letters, ironically I had to fill in multiple years worth of forms to escape the system even though I was in another country, and then they eventually worked out they owed me money.
Then there were the server failures due to load, for a specific online petition. Noone cared, but it was basically due to using old MS technology called Webforms which creates gargantuan data blobs per user/session called ViewState, which ran the servers out of memory. I think the online census submissions process had a similar issue too.
I do agree its nice to deal with these things from home rather than queue in some official building somewhere though.
Maybe I just have a natural tendency to attract flies to bypewriters or something. Maybe I'm bitter because I've built entire sites for the government only for them to throw the lot away once it was done, because the site might make them look bad.
I'm just very aware of the downsides of over-automation. If you're a valid case, but the existing system doesn't cater to you, then you become the problem rather than the system being the problem.
Anyway, I still think its awesome that the ACCC noticed this entanglement and brought it to peoples attention, and are one of the few indepedent bodies left that have some teeth.
The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again.
Sometimes I've known exactly what the problem is and don't want to jump through the hoops of level 1 help to get to level 2 to get to level 3 which can take hours but can be mitigated by outlining the problem in a public forum you know they have reps montoring, and its resolved in minutes. You can still achieve this reasonably politely and thank them afterwards and its actually a good outcome for both parties.
They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either!
Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down.
In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right...
I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.
Then again, somehow Newscorp got their way vs. facebook/google - only fair the ACCC does too.
You are forgetting the number of democratic countries which forced their COVID app from Appstore/Playstore on their citizens. They came short of calling it mandatory download but mandated the app as entry pass for several services.
You don't use a monopoly powered smartphone? You cannot afford a phone at all? Tough luck buddy(/s).
Only reason these COVID pass apps didn't stick around in the democratic countries is because the apps didn't do what's it's supposed to do; Ironically because the app couldn't be made mandatory download thereby not achieving the critical mass.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countrie...
[2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-tech...
But what democratic countries are mandating the use of covid apps?
If the former is true for you, it didn't mean I meant your country alone in my original comment.
In case I can save anyone else the time I spent, I initially read this as op saying that I should search for the phrase 'COVID app mandatory for' in one of the two articles op previously linked [1][2]. This phrase does not show up in either link.
I believe op is suggesting that I google this phrase but I think I already have spent too much time on this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps#List_of_countrie...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/covid-19-tracking-tech...
In my view, you guys have something good. Stay vigilant!
If the consequences for you are larger than that because you think your country is somehow monitoring your statements, I doubt being vague like this actually helps and you could always supply some other country as evidence, since your statements imply there are multiple.
I assumed the statements I made about COVID app mandatory for services in many countries was a common knowledge. I failed to account that not many keep tabs on stuff happening outside their own country and that many believe the democratic freedoms they enjoy is universal.
Couple of up votes is not worth it to put up with nationalist terrorists. Free speech cannot be taken for granted every where.
[1]: https://www.service.nsw.gov.au/transaction/covid-safe-check
Distribute free phones which is capable of running these COVID apps and then the issue comes down to just privacy.
Alternate physical form seems reasonable.
*just : Not to reduce the importance of privacy(EFF commentary in my other comment).
Democracies can be just as tyrannical as any other forms of government, doubly true when the people in that democracy have replaced the desire for freedom, with the desire for safety which most societies in the world today have less desire to be free, and more of a desire to be safe; falsely believing they can actually trade freedom for safety.
Now, there are around 50 mil taxpayers in India and if the government wanted, they can switch them to Foss products in an instant but Microsoft lobby is huge. Not that it benefits Microsoft, I for one have never paid for a Microsoft product, thanks to keygens. Still,
I think an incompetent gov is a much more realistic hypothesis.
BAS (and all tax documents) can still be submitted via a Tax Agent or via Mail. There is no "lock in". Chances are if you own a computer, you own an android and an apple phone, who cares.
Mountain meet molehill.
Source: https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Business-activity-statements...
However I am still worried that governments basically make us choose between 1/ buying in into this duopoly, or 2/ using slower, decade-old processes. It feels like if you want to stay up to date with society, you actually have no real choice.
I mean, those apps could certainly be open-source and distributed through F-Droid as well. In Republic, these are "public things" after all.
You're in this thread and you can't find anyone who cares about locking in a duopoly?
It's one of the few closed source apps I have on my phone and forces me to install a workaround like yalp in order to get it. (playstore requires a google login to use)