Coronavirus and the end of herd impunity

Location based tracking apps, electronic ankles, drones... all technologies are being used to enforce lockdowns, quarantines and curfews, to search and destroy any will to ruin the common effort to flatten those damn curves.

At the herd level, our usage patterns brought precious insights about how both viruses (COVID-19 and STUPID-20) spread, most notably people flocking away from big cities to speed up curves across rural areas (Orange found that 17% of Parisians left the capital in the final hours before lockdown), or spring breakers sharing the fun during their spring breakout back home (see Tectonic's viral tweet below*):

When it comes to tracking individuals, Korea set the new standards very early with these alerts blaring on your phone each time a new case of COVID-19 pops up near you. You can't see the full individual's name but you know their age, their address, their nationality, and their exact path over the previous days. When on quarantine, you're tracked by GPS (three Vietnamese students were caught cheating in a Gunsan park - the truant officer found out that they left their phones home), you have to send every day your self-diagnosis on two different apps (one for the Ministry of Health, another for the Ministry of Interior), and you have to share your morning and afternoon temperatures by SMS - mercifully it's not intrusive to the point they send a drone to do it themselves.

And most of us are okay with the new safety-privacy trade-offs, because nowadays security means actual survival. Same thing with visual contacts. As we're deprived of basic liberties during confinement, we're willing to open our doors far wider than we would normally to co-workers, distant contacts or even total strangers. Somehow, as we grow our personal spheres, we're enabling more people to extend their reaches within them, break into our homes, Zoom into our interiors. Somehow, this virus has become the mother of all Troyan horses.

And when this pandemic is over, we probably won't return to normal. We won't mind when our operators charge us $5 a month for SD cards (as in Social Distancing), we won't flinch when they send electric shocks each time we come within 6 feet of other passers-by. 

As long as they let us graze on the greener side of the electric fence.


mot-bile 2020


* ICYMI

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin

— Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020