Do you like have a glass of bourbon late in the evening? Or perhaps the occasional cigar? Well a new app designed to help keep track of coronavirus could soon be using this leisurely knowledge to score and rank your health, and sharing that information with anyone the app maker wishes.
In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, there will no doubt be a number of ridiculous government overreaches. Unscrupulous officials the world over will soon be looking for ways to invade the privacy of their citizens under the pretense that it will help keep them safe.
Over in China, where human rights aren’t alway a top priority, a new smartphone app is looking to rank and score citizens based on their health…and it’s drawing criticism from the world at large.
A Chinese local government’s proposal for a post-coronavirus health app that ranks citizens based on their smoking, drinking, exercise and sleep habits has sparked fury online over privacy concerns
China has already developed apps that indicate an individual’s likelihood of contracting coronavirus based on their travel history and whether they had come into contact with an infected case.
Hangzhou, a high-tech hub and home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, was among the first Chinese cities to adopt such an app, which gives people a green, yellow or red code that determines if they can buy travel tickets or enter public places.
But that’s not all…
The software monitors users in real-time and ranks them on a 100-point “health gradient” scale, according to a post on the commission’s website.
According to shots of the app shared in the post, it ranks citizens out of the entire population of Hangzhou based on their health score, which changes according to the user’s daily actions.
For example, drinking a glass of white wine could set your score back by 1.5 points, while sleeping for seven hours could improve it by one point.
The communist regime in China already employs an incredibly invasive “social credit” system, in which citizens are publicly shamed for this inability to pay bills on time, or the amount demerits they accrue via things like parking tickets.
This app seems to be the next logical-yet-evil step in the authoritarian government’s attempts to control every aspect of their citizens’ lives.
