3 ms·

But won't people be labeled conspiracy theorists (or some equivalent) the next pandemic as well? The authorities will claim it's safe and that'll be good enough

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's a trade-off. People take on risk of the information being abused for the benefit of not living through quite so many years of a pandemic. Problem is, when the authorities abuse the collected data, the trade-off balance changes and everyone gets to live through a longer pandemic as a result.
• lesuorac 4y ago
  There's too many broad strokes in your post. What countries / etc do "people" and "authorities" refer to? Whether or not people are going to be labeled conspiracy theorist varies wildly based on who is actually being talked about. Anyways to the article, of course individuals within any government will abuse their power. But as long as things are kept transparent the rest of the government can react to those abuses. Like in Australia, "Police in both states did not address AP questions regarding why they sought the data, and lawmakers in Queensland and Victoria have since tightened the rules on police access to QR check-in information." . w.r.t. the US, the Federal government purchased data types that were already available _pre-pandemic_ a (cell phone locations). The article does not claim or suggest that the contact tracing efforts were used inappropriately. Instead, existing 3rd party sources (your phone company) continued to sell data as they've pretty much always done.