Letters | Covid-19 health code: why should privacy concerns trump health and security?
- Readers discuss the merits of undue attention to the right to privacy, how Hong Kong’s Palace Museum can draw on the resources of its Beijing counterpart, and the decision to cull wild boars
I am sick and tired of regularly reading and hearing these words in the Hong Kong media for the past year or so whenever contact-tracing phone apps are discussed.
There is a global pandemic raging, and yet all residual China-bashers in Hong Kong can do is to keep regurgitating this ridiculous notion that “privacy concerns” should rate as a higher priority than protecting the health and security of both Hong Kong and China as a whole.
The entire Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance needs to be reviewed. This law was born in 1995 just before the handover, foisted on Hong Kong along with other misguided legislation by the departing British administration. They were determined to leave Hong Kong with a deep moat around the “two systems” and with as little hint as possible of the “one country”, a strategy which in retrospect helped the city slide into becoming a hotbed of anti-China insurgency.
Police and security services in Western democracies track citizens by monitoring their mobile phones, sometimes with court orders but on other occasions without such niceties when “national security” deems it unnecessary.