Health apps now determine whether people are allowed to leave the house
covid-19 virus started spreading in China, and the government began locking down the country, Shen Dacheng’s friends called her a prophet. Her short story “Miss Box Man”, published in 2018, is set in a world of virus-induced fear. The rich live in sealed containers which protect them from the pathogen. For the rest, life is a constant series of compulsory blood tests and hosings-down with disinfectant. Those found with the virus are seized. Some are killed on the spot.
Much of China’s success so far in containing the virus’s spread outside Hubei has depended on mobilising legions of people to man checkpoints armed with clipboards and thermometer guns, or to go door-to-door making note of sniffles.
But those efforts involve only a single province. Creating such systems is far harder when it entails data-sharing between provinces, or between provincial and central authorities. Co-operation is undermined by competition for favour in Beijing. The boss of a foreign artificial-intelligence developer in China says that fusing datasets within a single firm is often quick, but not if it involves co-operation between different institutions.
For now, China’s digital monitoring methods for covid-19 are a hodgepodge of disjointed efforts by city and provincial governments, as well as the technology giants Alibaba and Tencent. Witness the self-assessment system that ensnared Ms Sun. It is being rolled out by Ant Financial, an Alibaba affiliate that runs Alipay, a ubiquitous payment app. Two hundred cities are now using it, says Alibaba, after its trial in Hangzhou. Ant Financial eventually plans to offer it nationwide.
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