14 April

The government is about to release an app that people will be asked to use to allow their location to be tracked, to vastly speed up contact tracing for Covid-19. Brilliant idea, phones are maybe our most powerful weapons against pandemics. But no doubt ‘privacy’ will concern some. My two cents. This is data about your social interactions, not your private life. These privacy views are legacies of our bizarre ideas about how power and control work, the ‘Big Brother’ nonsense. There is no Big Brother, that’s a grown up version of the boogey man. Orwell made it clear in his novel it was a fiction created by the people themselves. (He was dying of another plague - TB - as he wrote it.)