Chinese society is well on its way to becoming more and more Orwellian as surveillance becomes part of an individual's daily lives.
As China has slowly returned back to normalcy after coronavirus cases began to dip in early April, the nation's government has used the pandemic as an excuse to tighten its grip on civil society. The Communist nation has released an app which monitors the health of citizens, posing serious questions about the privacy of each individual in the country.
This mobile phone application, on the pretext of seeking information about COVID-19 infection, is collecting private information related to health from its one crore citizens. All citizens have to mandatorily upload their health information on the app on the basis of which a health score will be released. The score will be out of 100 marks.
An individual is also required to upload information about their lifestyle-if a person smokes or drinks alcohol, and also upload how many steps he has taken in a day.
However, the endgame of collecting such information is quite sinister. As the citizens make any trip-a visit to the office, availing any public transport, going to a local shop-a QR code issued by the app based on the personal details, will be scanned, which will furnish a health score required to avail any service.
Based on the scores, people are given colour codes-green, red or yellow, which will determine whether a person will be able to travel freely in the country or not. Those who have a green code on their app are allowed to go anywhere, while those with yellow and red colour codes are prohibited and asked to stay in-home quarantine.
As China imposes these extreme measures, this sinister mass surveillance programme will be used to track the activities of its citizens.
Currently, 100 crore people are using these QR Codes in China, and people have used codes nearly 900 million times since February.
With this programme, it creates two categories of people-one group of citizens are healthy and allowed to freely travel wherever they want, while the other group who has low health scores will not be allowed to leave their houses, or allowed to leave with a lot of restrictions.
Chinese society is well on its way to becoming more and more Orwellian as surveillance becomes part of an individual's daily lives.
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