How the Chinese anti-Covid (extreme) tracking app works
How the Chinese coronavirus tracking app works. Mario Seminerio's article
The Chinese approach to the so-called Zero Covid makes use of tracking technology and pervasive controls, also based on profiling of citizens and their behavior. For example, anyone who goes to the pharmacy to get a cold medicine can only do so by means of prior identification. After such a purchase, entering the data into the system determines that, when entering a public place, a noisy alarm starts from the mobile phone of the victim, which causes the vacuum around him, and the order to undergo tests for the Covid.
If the test is positive, the app reports a red code that forces you to quarantine at your home or in an official facility. The problem is that it seems that "someone" has decided to use the tracking system for other purposes. It happened in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan.
RED CODE, CLEAR
A few hundred citizens, who arrived in the city to protest against the blocking of their savings by some rural banks in financial difficulty, as soon as they arrived at the station and when they read the QR Code that was to authorize the go-ahead, they received the report of red code and were taken by police to quarantine hotels , only to be put back on the return train the next day, in violation of confinement regulations. The day after returning home, the code returned to green.
Such situations also occurred on the occasion of protests in front of the headquarters of the banking regulator also in Zhengzhou, following the stalemate in the construction of buildings for which citizens had already paid advances. After the protests on social media, the pass is back to green.
There have also been tales of real “virtuosity” of digital surveillance. For example, a citizen who has never been to Zhenghzhou to protest but depositor of the disputed banks, scans the QR code received by phone from an acquaintance, and immediately receives the red code; his wife does the same but nothing happens, perhaps because she is not a depositor of that bank.
After the protests, the regime decided to intervene and sanction the local authorities of Zhengzhou, on the grounds that in no case should the health app be used for different purposes, to avoid undermining the credibility of the health tracking system. Their goodness.
Even assuming an excess of zeal on the part of local authorities in the management of systems and databases, which obviously have the possibility of being managed also at a decentralized level, and also assuming that the central authorities have actually realized the danger of similar casual and improper uses of the tracking system, the potential for social surveillance towards which China is heading remains very high. Because, as is well known, down there personal data is something too important to leave it to those who produce it.
(Extract from an article published in Phastidio ; here the full version)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cina-tracciamento-covid-sorveglianza-digitale/ on Sun, 14 Aug 2022 06:36:06 +0000.