As soon as the idea of a government-created App specifically designed to track you was announced last year, privacy and freedom campaigners issued warnings about its potential abuse.
The government repeatedly assured us that our data was perfectly safe from hackers and third parties seeing it. Of course, that was not what campaigners were warning the public about. Disproving a different point to the one raised is a common tactic in the information war now raging, but this didn't satisfy the campaigners who knew that giving the government a device to track and trace your movements was madness and would inevitably lead to its misuse.
The narrative currently put forward about the system is that it has been costly (37 BILLION so far) and failed to make even a dent on the pandemic, due to the incompetence of Dido Harding and Public Health England. But, in reality, the system has been a total success by fulfilling its real agenda: Both tracking people's movements and as a training device for Vaccine Passports it has been a total success. Millions of people downloaded it, effectively giving away their privacy to the state.
What the general public are also unaware of is that since last November the NHS has been in discussions with US billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Palantir corporation with a view to analysing the NHS Covid ‘data store’. Whilst in December the NHS signed a two-year £23million contract with Palantir, and it is only as a result of legal action that the Government has agreed not to extend this contract without public consultation. Thiel also happens to be a major player in the World Economic Forum, being a partner of the Founder Fund.
Former advisor to President Clinton, Dr Naomi Wolf said on the Tucker Carlson show: ‘It’s not about the virus. It’s not about the vaccine. It’s about your data’ and the creation of integrated platforms, because ‘any other functionality can be loaded on to that platform’ – health data, Paypal data etc." Wolf argues that if the vaccine passport plans roll out, this is the end of liberty in the West.
As we have seen, the NHS Test and Trace app is run with the help of Apple and Google. There is an agreement that location data is not shared. That data stays within the phone. Recently Apple and Google blocked the Government’s plans for updating the app because the Government wanted users to upload logs of venue check-ins and to do so would have violated the companies’ privacy terms. But should we feel so reassured that Silicon Valley is ‘protecting’ our privacy? After all, as soon as the app has alerted you to the risk of the virus, you are obliged to put yourself under house arrest for ten days, asked to sign into the NHS website and give all your personal information as well as that of people you have been in contact with. Somewhere all this private information is being stored. At what point is your privacy protected in any of that?
Tech experts have warned, for the app to work, it has to always be 'on', running in the background, monitoring exactly where you are, and who you are associating with. Whilst privacy campaigners like Big Brother Watch have repeatedly warned that the temptation for governments to misuse your data would be simply too good an opportunity to pass-up, it has now become clear that is exactly what is happening.
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