> Without a clear public benefit I suspect there would be workarounds and hacks within days to dilute its effectiveness.
Exaxtly. Governments can easily do this, because they already have the bigger tool at their disposal: lockdowns.
People in prisons choose to wear an electronic tracker to spend the last year of a sentence at home. Their freedom was already taken, and the monitoring is a way to get some of it back. No one turns that down out of fear the government won’t remove the tracking thing around their ankle. “No thanks I don’t trust them to take it off after a year so I’m staying in the cell”, said no one ever. If you don’t trust them to take it off after a year why would you trust them to unlock your cell door?
Of course the public will choose to use this tech if the alternative is less freedom.
So yes people will voluntarily use this because of peer pressure and because the alternative is worse. At least they will do so in countries with high trust in goverment, the public healthcare system and a strong sense of community in crisis (this is where I would have thought the UK would be the obvious example!). “For the public good” is very persuasive to me - while “for your own good” might work better in other places.
> Any such governments come to mind?
Most Western European governments I would have thought? I (Scandinavian) always considered the government to be “me”, not “them”.
And the way governments would take advantage of this is by having devices everywhere exchanging IDs so that when somebody has a disease, those devices will let the government figure out some of the places they've been? This sounds too roundabout to make any sense. The government can already request location history from cell phone providers and Google if it has a warrant. Why go through all that trouble to get lower quality data?
Exaxtly. Governments can easily do this, because they already have the bigger tool at their disposal: lockdowns.
People in prisons choose to wear an electronic tracker to spend the last year of a sentence at home. Their freedom was already taken, and the monitoring is a way to get some of it back. No one turns that down out of fear the government won’t remove the tracking thing around their ankle. “No thanks I don’t trust them to take it off after a year so I’m staying in the cell”, said no one ever. If you don’t trust them to take it off after a year why would you trust them to unlock your cell door?
Of course the public will choose to use this tech if the alternative is less freedom.
So yes people will voluntarily use this because of peer pressure and because the alternative is worse. At least they will do so in countries with high trust in goverment, the public healthcare system and a strong sense of community in crisis (this is where I would have thought the UK would be the obvious example!). “For the public good” is very persuasive to me - while “for your own good” might work better in other places.
> Any such governments come to mind?
Most Western European governments I would have thought? I (Scandinavian) always considered the government to be “me”, not “them”.