Dear MEL Topic Readers,
How Russia is using authoritarian tech to
curb coronavirus
Big Brother is a fictional character and the symbol in a famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell published
seven decades ago. The ruling party of the fictional society has the total
power over the inhabitants, and every citizen is under constant surveillance by
the authority.
Now in 2020, some governments are increasingly
getting logs of their people’s daily activities. Surveillance cameras, facial
recognition technologies, geolocation records, and credit card and mobile
payment transactions are used integratedly to identify individual’s movements
and activities and when and where. This helps track coronavirus carriers and
their contacts so that the authority can arrest those who violated quarantine
or social distancing or warn who had close contacts with them.
Such surveillance and tracking by the
government will raise privacy concerns and political backlash in normal times. However,
the world is under pandemic and people tend to accept, or even welcome, such
government intrusion of privacy to save their lives.
Is this going to be a new norm even after the
pandemic is over?
Enjoy reading the article and think if you
support such government initiatives to cope with the pandemic.
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