1/ The Government of Canada should make a pandemic management app before the private sector does, so we can make sure the data indeed remains private (this is assuming we can trust the government on that front, which admittedly is one helluva leap of faith in 2020)...
2/ An app like this could be an extremely effective tool in helping to beat the 🦠, the catch being that more effective the tool, the more personal data users would have to provide.
3/ examples: An app tracking location of users could help significantly with tracing, alerting other users if they have been in the close vicinity of someone who fell ill in recent days...
4/ The app could also offer up diagnostic screening based on questionnaire and provide links and updated information to users based on their location, and potentially help with tracing if users’ contacts were shared with public health authorities...
5/ I would hope such a thing would be voluntary and provide mostly anonymized data (hence whoever puts it together would need strong public oversight). Ironically this is the kind of personal info many of us provide to large corporations all the time (Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.)
6/ Seen examples from China of phone data like this being used by authorities to track (and punish) people defying quarantine. Political leaders here have expressed reluctance about that level of surveillance - but if the 🥕 method doesn’t show results, we know stick will come.😬
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