Ceding your personal freedom for the mirage of safety?

“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”
⏤Thomas Jefferson.

What a difference a year makes. A bit over a year ago, the headlines were flooded with stories of how users were being secretly tracked by Google/Apple/Facebook and every other big data player, and how, even though that data was aggregated and randomized, that was a usurpation of privacy. Protesters, up in arms, screamed that Congress should intervene. Congress, never one to refuse the power to intimidate, did hold hearings, inviting Google and others to Capitol Hill.

This year, right now, the governors from the same states who were having a temper tizzy over random data collection are the same ones leading the charge for implementing trackers on phones, arguably to help fight Coronavirus. These are governors from states like California and New York, self-asserted liberal bastions. Think about that: Not randomized data, but data on where each and every citizen goes. Do you want a bureaucrat to be able to pull up a history of everywhere you've gone and everyone you've seen, and for how long? You don't need to wear a tin hat to imagine that that might not be a great thing in a free society.

So this is how it starts:

• They take away your civil liberties for what seem like reasonable reasons.
• And then, having established they can take away your civil liberties, they manufacture more reasons.
• And, eventually, the reasons are simply because they say so.

Ask those who were interned during World War II if society is capable of balancing tyranny and safety.

Coronavirus was the nucleus. What society does with it--what they allow to be done with it--is on us.