2. The justification for the tracking system will be that the vaccine isn't good enough to protect people without mandatory vaccinations.
3. Why would there need to be tracking in remote parts of rural Canada? There is basically nobody there. It is rural. How many people do you even know who live outside the range of cell phone towers?
That is... bizarre. Very bizarre. Do you have a link to read more?
Allowing people to leave their house for up to an hour of exercise: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58277503
Firing on protesters: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/21/victo...
I watched the entire thing live, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The Guardian also did an expose on the instigators of those protests are accessed a group chat where the organisers were discussing how to slowly introduce the "Jewish question" to the crowd they'd managed to rile up.
The "anti-lockdown protests" have consistently attracted some very unpleasant kooks, cranks and opportunists, from the "5g mind control" lot to the "international banker conspiracy" lot. It's omni-nutty. Piers Corbyn is a regular at the UK ones. In the US, I am sure that all roads lead to QAnon and their anti-Semitic totalising conspiracy theory. The intensity and nature of crankery is shifting.
In other words, someone off the rails agreeing with a large group on one issue doesn't mean the whole group is off the rails.
No, it means that the "nazi fuckwits" and "off the rails people" are _recruiting_ and doing so where the audience is worked up and receptive to their radicalisation.
If the only ones who are listening to the disagreeing moderates are radicals, we should expect an increase in radicalization.
You'll either eject the cranks or become them. The (possibly apocryphal) tale is "As we say in Germany, if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."
This dynamic has happened many many times on the left, with the far left cranks.
Half the crowd left, then the remaining crowd pumped themselves up and attacked the police after being peaceful the entire day.
Seems to me like the reasonable ones left and the remainders were assholes. The extremists were the ones being shot with rubber bullets. Anyone that wasn't an extremist and still got shot is an idiot, they had every opportunity to voice their opinion peacefully.
But all I hear from the fucking yanks on HN is them projecting their own politics onto what's happening over here. There's so much misinformation in threads like these and everyone laps it up like idiots. Like I said before, I watched the entire day live on my second monitor, from livestreams run by the protestors themselves. I got their viewpoint, which shows clearly what happened. Whereas the people trying to argue against policy brutality here are doing so with Fox News rhetoric, not with facts.
We need more eyes on the police, at all times. But we need that scrutiny to come with facts. I have no love for Victoria Police, but I'm sick of them and our liberal (small L) government being the focal point of a debate half way across the world that completely misses the mark. HN seems like it skews left on privacy and surveillance issues, but because of it's American focus, the people here just spew dangerous rhetoric that risks cutting the head off the lesser evil, when we have an ultra conservative federal government pushing the most authoritarian tech surveillance laws in the western world. They're on opposite sides here. As long as there's no realistic chance of getting the average person to vote for a third party, if it's all the same, I'd prefer if you all stop letting an American media invasion turn us into the 4th fucking reich.
From what I can garner, there are such systems on trial, though as of Sept 16 the trials were on a voluntary basis.
For example, there is a (quite small) trial of facial recognition for home quarantine of international travelers. Now that's a topic worthy of discussion - But it's an extraordinary leap to say everyone is taking pictures of themselves (i.e that's just not true at all).
It's similar for most of your assertions.
There have been quite a number of strict rules in different parts of Australia at different times. Most are now being wound back in line with vaccination rates.
These passports will remain a long time.
The app used in BC is open source and available on Github: https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-iOS https://github.com/bcgov/BCVAX-Android
It works just fine with the device in airplane mode, and does not maintain a record of the QR codes it has verified.
You download a QR code from the government. You are identified at this point and linked to your test results given your QR code.
Those open source clients are for BC only. Assuming the app store version matches those clients that ensures you are not being track in private businesses during a vaccine check.
This doesn't ensure the federal system is using the same clients or other provinces.
This doesn't ensure a vaccine passport check before boarding a train by a government official doesn't link your travel/location.
The only thing we are sure is this will protect tracking at the private level in BC if the business has airplane mode on and both have downloaded and built the client themselves.
There are multiple independent open source implementations of the SMART Health Card QR standard. It's really just some JSON + compression/encoding/digital signature.
The approach I have described is being used across Canada, and based on what has been indicated so far, this is in fact the intended direction of the federal government.
Vaccine passport checks are not conducted by government officials. They are conducted by the private businesses where the checks take place.
iOS 15 includes "app privacy report" functionality, and if the government were secretly submitting a different version to the app store than they claim they are (with secret reporting of scan data back to the mothership included in the app store builds), they would be trivially caught by anybody using this feature. It would show up in the network traffic logs that are available for anybody to inspect.
Mobile applications are also not that difficult to decompile to identify hidden functionality.
We can both be pretty sure that no tracking is taking place, and that it would be unrealistic for this system to be used for tracking purposes without that becoming a matter of public knowledge rather quickly.
As for tracking by private companies. At your local pizza shop your location may not be tracked through the open source clients you list but at larger venues the opportunity for information gathering/sharing is possible. Previously one could buy a ticket to a game from someone outside now everyone eventing must identify themselves.
I checked the places I've lived for the last 10 years in Vancouver, none of them are eligible for fiber optic.
Rural Canada is much better connected than major cities.
It's not easy to not be trackable in Canada, every highway of any significance has a highway cam. If you really want to live off grid in a tent I suppose you could evade tracking.
For 99% of people, they are easily tracked. Tracking isn't about 100% compliance its about 99% compliance.
Got any sources indicating that this is in the works?
This is setting the infrastructure to implement a social credit system. It is a small step from here to to full thing. The intent is the same and the tools are similar.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/transport-canada/news/2021/10/manda...
[1] https://www.ohscanada.com/opinions/mandatory-vaccination-pol...
[2] https://www.hrreporter.com/opinion/canadian-hr-law/the-movem...
There is evidence in the article that the vaccines reduce the risks of COVID by 2-3 orders of magnitude, which gets it into the range of a bad flu. We know that a lot of people have already had COVID and pose a lower risk than someone who is vaccinated. These compliance systems are going to do more harm than good. It is never going to work out well when the government brings in authoritarian compliance measures to protect a majority from a minority who are being accused of causing all the problems of today. That script has been put into production before.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-v...
"The CDC researchers found that people previously infected but unvaccinated were 2.34 times more likely to get reinfected than people who were previously infected and fully vaccinated."
"The researchers saw even more variability when they looked at neutralizing antibodies—those known to bind to the virus and prevent it from infecting cells. Neutralizing antibody levels in recovered people varied over a range of 40,000-fold, and up to 20 percent of people didn't have any detectable level of neutralizing antibody."
For vaccines, we have data showing they are highly effective:
http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/Vaccine_Effec...
We have data showing reduction in transmission as a result of vaccination.
We don't have comparable data for people who have merely been previously infected, and in fact the data we do have seems to provide evidence that they pose higher risk. The immune system is not as reliable when it is having to fight off an infection while mounting its response vs when it is able to mount an immune response while not under attack from the virus.
We're quite happy here with our freedom to go to a restaurant or attend a festival without exposing ourselves to the risk of being around unvaccinated people.
And, fairly critically, it is crazy to start isolating people from social life over that low reinfection risk. You've been exposed to people who are unvaccinated for all sort of dangerous diseases through your life and nobody has tried to lock them out of society for that.
EDIT I suppose I'll throw in here this isn't about whether vaccination is good or not. Anyone who hasn't made up their mind at this point isn't persuaded by evidence. This is about how to treat people who make choices that the government disagrees with. Locking them off aeroplanes isn't the way.
I hate to tell you this. Putting restrictions on non-vaccinated people is not some Government conspiracy. It's literally what the vast majority of the people of Canada want for their safety. That includes your neighbours and (possibly) your family members.
That's what the government is supposed to do.
Sure, you could make some "tyranny of the majority" argument here but in the case of anti-vaxers, you'll be hard pressed to find any sympathy from most Canadians.
It's not a government conspiracy. It's the will of the people it represents. I know that doesn't make nearly as good a narrative, but it's the hard truth.
The worst time to do this is hastily and when people are feeling scared; these are some serious bridges being crossed. The systems being set up to deal with people who aren't scared of the coronavirus are going to be permanent and are a very decisive step in reshaping Western culture using the model trailed in China.