The Hong Kong government has been widely criticized for its ineffective strategies to combat the coronavirus pandemic. In the face of the fourth wave, it launched the contract tracing mobile app “Leave Home Safe” and yet did not close the borders to prevent travelers from mainland China from bringing the virus to the city. In the name of infection control and tracing the source of infections, Carrie Lam and her team are considering making the scanning of QR codes via the app a condition for people to enter certain commercial premises.

Currently, some venues such as restaurants display a QR code for patrons to scan on a voluntary basis. Yet Lam has made it clear that members of the public might later be required to use the app in order to enter those premises. She has stressed, however, that usage of the code is still voluntary. By that, she means one can choose not to go to premises that adopt the app.

Carrie Lam’s claim is sophistry. If people must scan a QR code in order to take public transport or dine at a restaurant, there is nothing voluntary about it as people are left with no choice. There is nothing voluntary at all if people have to quit their job or cannot use public transport if they do not want to use Leave Home Safe.

Pegged as a virus control tool, “Leave Home Safe” is actually a means to track users. When the government can keep track of where people go and which restaurants they dine at and so forth, surveillance will be everywhere. “Leave Home Safe” will automatically generate a local database, recording the place you visit and the records will be uploaded. The app also has facial recognition functions. There is a “mask or no mask” check and the face of the user will be recognized if he or she does not wear a mask. Once the government is able to carry out facial recognition, location tracking, and mass surveillance, it is very likely to abuse the app.

The New York Times has revealed that when users scan the so-called “health code”, the police can monitor their whereabouts in real time. This kind of surveillance system, when applied to Hong Kong, will certainly be used by police to search for evidence against certain people and make arrests, just as the “restriction on gathering” law is often used against protesters. Protecting the health of the community takes a back seat.

Leave Home Safe also requires access to a lot of personal data on your phone, including seemingly useless information such as device and app history. It retrieves information related to the running apps on your phone, reads the contents of your USB storage, modifies or deletes the contents of your USB storage, views Wi-Fi connections and network connections, and allows Wi-Fi Multicast reception. How is all this information related to infection control?

But the most dangerous part of the app is not about how much information it obtains from your device. The most concerning issue is that if we do not boycott it today but allow Big Brother to watch over all of us in the name of the pandemic, it will be a matter of time before the government makes it compulsory for everyone to use this surveillance app. When that happens, the government can change the configuration of the app, allowing real-time tracking, and we will be living in a dystopia just like people in mainland China.

I urge all of you to boycott the use of the app before it is too late to do so. Although it is always easier to make compromises than to fight, there is no more room for compromising today. And as we learned last year, compromising does not work.

(Glacier Kwong, born and raised in Hong Kong, became a digital rights and political activist at the age of 15. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Law and working on the course for Hong Kong in Germany. Her work has been published on Washington Post, TIME, etc.)

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