Alipay Health Code and Corona 100m

The Covid-19 emergency doesn’t end and one is trying in every way to stop it. Some specific apps like Alipay Health Code are so born between prevention and control of the country.

The application was realized by a company of the e-commerce colossus Alibaba and it creates a QR code for every user: green, yellow or red, every color tells when the user is moving around the city.

What Alipay Health Code is and what’s the use of it

If your QR code is green you can freely enter (once scanned your code at the entrance) inside buildings, offices, malls. If your code is orange instead you have many restrictions, while if your code is red that’s mean that you must stay in preventive quarantine for seven or even fourteen days.

A way to personalized limit the movements, by allowing to someone more actions and to others instead preventive quarantine, without penalise the whole population.

The real question though is how this app creates the code. From where does it take the datas? On what basis is it able to give a different colour for every person? Probably it uses crossed datas given by the hospital together with the social ones, to assume a network of met people. Anyway the calculation is approximate, many infact complain about the thing that they never met infected people. Currently though going around China without this app became almost impossible.

An article of the New York Times talks about an “experiment to control the citizens” and about a possible connection with the police about the datas supply.

The system was launched the 11st of february and it was already used by 200 towns and three provinces. So it currently check the movements of 180 million of people. And while in Bejing they are thinking to use it, the NY Times is wondering if the datas in the source code to in the point “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” can’t harming too much the privacy rights.

It really seems that for the China the corona virus, thanks to Alipay Health Code, became an occasion to control all the citizens in a much more strongly way.

Infact the app, according to who realized it, uses the big data and evaluates the risk of infection according even to the initial survey. But the people to which was assigned the red or the orange code started to believe that there was something else. So one assumes the free access to governative databases where it’s possible to find informations about flights, train and buses tickets.

The South Corea China

It seems that the China, with its Alipay Health Code, isn’t the only country to choose a plan of control on the population. Infact even the South Corea decided to use this approach.

The app in this case is called Corona 100m. Even in this case the usage of the crossed datas of the big data, the Gps position, and the surveillance cameras made up their noses about the privacy. However, in South Corea they proudly claims that it’s the only way to know if they met person that had the disease.

Europe and United States are carefully watching the system, underlining the limits of this kind of application. Infact even though the usage of this app the infections don’t have a linear downshift trend. Anyway the total results are really great, so these apps are ever more used.

This post is also available in: Italiano