QR codes and sign-ins - how France's reopened restaurants keep track of customers

This is way more lax than either British or German tracking. And incomparably less strict than tracking in Taiwan and Israel. I’d say that French preserved quite a lot of freedom compared to others.

Who will stay home? All responsible people who are less selfish than you.

Johanna, can you imagine the utter pointlessness and in fact, impossibility, of tracking the minutest movements of every single person all day every day? It would be like inviting a massive self-inflicted DDoS attack that would almost instantly suffocate the world's intelligence systems. Governments have lists of people they want to keep an eye on. Being a human rights activist, advocate or defender is a reliable way to end up on one. Their 'intelligence' is usually banal and often fatuous. Over the last twenty five years I've been on four (that I know of). Here are some examples of their intelligenius: One. Subject was observed to enter the gents toilets where Julian Assange was shaving [[at a press event at the Frontline Club in London]]. Two. Subject was seen in a military-style vehicle in the Co. Durham hometown of a journo whom the Taliban were holding hostage in Afghanistan. [[I was in my old Landie, on my way home after driving my daughter up to her new uni - this sighting brought me a visit from Special Branch, who had a cup of tea with me and my wife and left apologising for the nuisance.]] Three. One of the subject's books was read by a ladies' book group in Longford, Derbyshire who reported, "We weren't sure whether to blush or laugh".[[Report from private US intelligence firm Stratfor for a client, obtained and published by Wikileaks.]] Four. I was having dinner with an old friend in intelligence and began telling him about some of the campaigning we'd been doing. He said, "Listen _____, I have a dossier on you this thick…" "Anything I should know about?" I asked. "No," he said, "you're terribly boring. Let's have another whisky." He was of course joking. Or was he? [[His wife wouldn't let him drink at home.]] Should you be worried about being tracked? Yes. We should all remember that our smart phones are already tracking us. And if you use Gmail, your messages are keyword-scanned by Google. If you have an Alexa AI, it listens to everything you say and squirts filtered info back to Amazon. Anything you look up, or at. on Google, or buy from Amazon, the pages you read on Facebook, the posts you 'like', the things you say on WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and Linked-In are selectively harvested to build up a formidable mass of information about you, all aimed at finding out what you're interested in so they can sell the information to advertisers. I wrote to a friend about footballs (I mean the round sort) recently and shouldn't have been, but was, surprised to find ads for Adidas and other brands of balls and boots bouncing around in my birdtracks across the net. So now I fly. If you want privacy, use a good VPN, a mail service like Hushmail, or Signal and browse using Tor, but privacy can't be taken for granted. The so-called Dark Web was penetrated and Dread Pirates Roberts, creator of the famous/infamous Silk Road can nowadays be found c/o the US Penitentiary in Tucson, where he is serving a double life sentence + 40 years. Please for everyone's sake, and your own sanity, try to discriminate between wild conspiracy theories designed to arouse hysteria and cause panic, and the genuinely antisocial conspiracies that are never talked about. Like the current carefully engineered boom in house prices in the UK.

A year ago France had *less* COVID cases and second wave was still a theoretical thing. Contact tracing is way more important *now* than ever before.

It is impossible. It might be possible in the future - if EU and UK agree on this.