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71 Percent Of Americans Reject Privacy Killing Contact Tracing Apps

Europeans also say no to government monitoring.

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Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Almost three quarters of Americans say they will not submit their privacy to contact tracing apps, with Europeans also rejecting the notion outright because they do not trust government to keep their information safe and refrain from misusing it.

A study from Avira reveals that the vast majority of Americans are against contact tracing apps, with 71 percent saying they will not download them, and 75% believing their digital privacy is at risk from the technology.

Image: Avira

The poll found that only 14 percent believe the government would protect their data effectively.

When asked if they would trust big tech more than the government, 32 percent said they would feel safe giving Apple or Google their data.

The study also noted that those working in Government and Healthcare are the least-likely to download the technology, with 84% of people from these sectors saying they will not use the apps.

Image: Avira

Travis Witteveen, CEO of Avira commented “We believe these survey results send a clear signal to both app creators and the government. COVID contact tracing apps could fail before they launch if developers don’t communicate to the public how they plan to protect people’s privacy.”

Meanwhile, in Germany people are also rejecting the contact tracing technology owing to privacy concerns.

The amount of people willing to use the apps has fallen to 42 percent, according to polling data from Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.

Statista notes that the latest data indicates a 6 percentage point drop since April:

Image: Statista

In Norway, the technology has been completely abandoned after it was deemed to be too invasive.

Amnesty International has warned that contact tracing apps like Norway’s are “most alarming mass surveillance tools”. The organisation’s assessment did not include the US contact tracing app.

In the UK, despite touting it for months, the government has (predictably) failed to roll out its contact tracing app because of bureaucracy.

Cybersecurity experts also analysed the source code of the app and found no less than seven major flaws.

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UK’s “Nudge Unit” recommends various online psychological manipulations when people shop and travel to push a “net zero society”

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Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net

Getty Images / Yuichiro Chino

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – started by the UK government to then in late 2021 become owned by Nesta, which describes itself as an independent charity focused on innovation – has a new report out.

And while its authors present it as a useful “guide” toward building “a net zero society,” what observers critical of this content have taken away from it is that it is promoting, and detailing, various forms of psychological manipulation of people.

The problem that Behavioural Insights Team (aka, “Nudge Unit”) has found for itself to solve is a part of the climate change narrative, where achieving “net zero” means doing away with greenhouse gas emissions.

And they don’t seem to care if the way to get there is through direct manipulation of people, specifically online, via prompts (“nudges”) toward making choices that are not really theirs but serve the agenda.

These choices concern and consume people’s everyday lives: what they wear, what and how much they eat, how they travel to work, whether that job is “climate-friendly,” how they travel just in general and where to, for example, for a vacation.

These are all examples of what the report aims to affect from the behavioral perspective, and clearly, the “solution” is to actively push citizens toward “social transformation.”

In this sense, the report recommends putting prompts in apps that would seek to direct the user to order less takeaway food through what critics might call “reality transformation” – one suggestion is changing the name of small portions to “regular portions.”

At one point, the report mentions BIT case study 4, which deals with “exploring” the role of social media influencers as vehicles to promote “green behaviors.”

BIT case study 12, meanwhile, is about “Helping Solent Transport deliver an effective ‘Mobility as a Service’ app.” Solent Transport is a partnership with local transport authorities, while the main idea here is “encouraging people out of cars” and “nudging” them toward other means of transportation.

BIT case study 15 is one about “encouraging” customers to order smaller portions on takeaway platforms.

Several suggestions are made to make “sustainable food easy,” including utilizing the fact that online shopping “gives many opportunities to provide timely substitution prompts, or encourage personalized goals and tips linked to product filters and ranking.”

BIT says that in producing these case studies of interventions, it partnered with “HMG, the French government, UAE’s Crown Prince Court, World Wildlife Forum, Unilever, Tesco, Sky, Gumtree, and Cogo,” among others.

This post was originally published at Reclaim The Net

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American Mother Who Lived in China Says She Misses State Bringing Up Her Children

Encourages western parents to embrace government interference in family life.

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Loop Swim/Manuel Augusto Moreno via Getty Images

An American fashion designer who raised her two daughters in Shanghai before returning to the US says she misses how her kids were ‘co-parented by the Chinese government’.

Yes, really.

49-year-old Heather Kaye and her husband arrived in the Communist country in 2005 and stayed there until last year, when they were forced to return to the US to escape China’s brutal COVID lockdown.

But far from feeling glad to be back, Kaye says she was sad to leave, describing Washington DC as a “culture shock” and lamenting the loss of the government’s direct intervention into family life.

In an article for the New York Times, Kaye celebrates how, “In China, government co-parenting begins in the womb,” adding that, “Chinese kindergarten lectured us on everything, including how many hours our daughters should sleep, what they should eat and their optimal weight.”

Kaye thanked the system for instilling discipline in her daughters from an early age, as well as “a total drive for academic excellence.”

“Each morning all of the students performed calisthenics in straight rows and raised China’s red flag while singing the national anthem,” she wrote.

“I learned to appreciate the strong sense of shared values and of people connected as a nation. Parenting, like governing, is an imperfect art,” said Kaye, encouraging Americans to surrender part of their child’s upbringing to the state in order to relieve the ‘burden’ on them.

She also praised how “heavy censorship” imposed by the state in the form of a limit on how long her daughters could play video games and a block on ‘harmful’ Internet content provided her with peace of mind.

Kaye is presumably somewhat confused as to the differences between Chinese authoritarianism and American authoritarianism.

Whereas government-run Chinese schools emphasize physical fitness, hard work and patriotism, American schools offer a very different form of education.

Whereas in China, loyalty to the Communist Party would have been encouraged, in American schools, loyalty to deranged, woke progressivism is the order of the day.

It’s very doubtful that Kaye’s children would have been exposed to CRT, books in libraries promoting LGBT, drag queen story time, as well as Black Lives Matter mantras about how their own country is an evil oppressor.

While children in China are undoubtedly subjected to brainwashing in schools, at least they’re not being taught that it’s normal to become a different gender, that being obese and unhealthy is acceptable, and that men can get pregnant.

You won’t find any of that in Shanghai, because the Chinese government, no matter how brutally authoritarian in other areas, at the very least doesn’t hate its own population.

Meanwhile, in America, it wouldn’t be surprising to see kids being made to perform loyalty oaths to rainbow-colored flags within a decade the way things are going.

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Video: CNN Host Stelter Sad Over Demise Of ‘Ministry Of Truth’

Tucker Carlson compares CNN anchor to ‘paralyzingly stupid’ character from Orwell’s 1984

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Steve Watson

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After CNN’s potato headed weirdo Brian Stelter declared he was sad about a literal Ministry of Truth being put on hold by the Biden administration, Tucker Carlson mocked his ‘paralyzing stupidity’ and compared him to a character from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Carlson played clips of Stelter expressing annoyance that conservatives outed the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Disinformation Governance Board and its leader Nina Jankowicz as authoritarian, leading to it being mothballed.

“By far the most entertaining person Joe Biden has appointed to anything was that Nina woman he put in charge of the Ministry of Truth,” Carlson said, adding that “She was so ridiculous and provably so that she’s out.”

“But at CNN, they are sad. They wanted her there forever,” Carlson continued.

Carlson asserted that Stelter “loved the idea of a Ministry of Truth,” because the CNN clown is himself “basically lifted directly from the pages of 1984, the Orwell novel.”

Carlson then quoted from the novel a passage describing Tom Parsons, a character who “works as a flack for the Ministry of Truth”: 

He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms. One of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom a more even than on the thought police, the stability of the party depended.

George Orwell, 1984


“Now, we’re not saying that’s a perfect, word-for-word description of someone who currently has a media analysis show on CNN, we’re gonna let you judge,” Carlson quipped, adding “in case you’re wondering, was George Orwell a prophet? Yeah, clearly he was.”

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