Trustworthy surveillance
mercredi 29 avril 2020 à 02:00Poland says that people can trust its centralized quarantine tracker because the data will be saved for "only" six years and only the Polish government will have access to it. That doesn't make it very trustworthy.
On the one hand, 14 days of location tracking data, which on each occasion reports that you are in the same place (at home), is nothing to worry about in itself. If I were in quarantine for a few weeks, infected with coronavirus, I would not object to being tracked for that period.
I would not let them do it with a portable phone, though, because that device can also listen and transmit at any time, and it can be tracked by others aside from the quarantine authority. I would not install a nonfree program on my computer to do it, either.
I would invite the government to lend me a portable phone with a broken microphone for the duration of my quarantine. Then I would uncover its camera when agents call me through it. I would not care what software they have installed on their phone while I borrow it, as long as it could not do anything except the job it is officially supposed to do. If they wanted to hear my voice as well, they could call my landline at the same time.
On the other hand, the general defeatist attitude in the quotation at the end, "They know all about us, so why resist their systems to know all about us," is a very important mistake. All we need, to force systems to be redesigned so that "they" won't "know all about us", is to throw off the defeatism and start demanding they do so.