NOTICE

This piece is our annual April Fool's article. Unfortunately, nearly everything in it is true. While Google is NOT releasing an app called "Corona Waze," the World Health Organization is indeed developing a COVID-19 app that has been described as "Waze for COVID-19."36

All other details are true, and describe a rapidly-approaching reality in which personal freedoms are decimated to "protect" us all from an infectious disease. To avoid this dystopian future, it is imperative that we fight to protect and preserve our right to privacy — be it medically related or not — both online and offline.

The new Google app "Corona Waze" asks users to "tag" individuals who sneeze, cough, are sweating or have a runny nose. You can also tag people who do not use soap or wash their hands for at least 20 seconds, or for other social distancing violations. People can also be tagged for not wearing gloves or masks, or hoarding toilet paper and cleaning supplies.

Facial recognition systems deployed through nationwide security cameras will be used to identify offenders who are not carrying cell phones while Google's Fitbit will automatically report unfavorable biometrics to alert emergency services. Google's Android phone camera will utilize thermographic temperature fluctuations while taking selfies or pictures of others to alert medical marshals of potential fevers.

Surveillance companies like Google have become essential tools to properly enforce pandemic protocols. An accelerated nationwide 5G rollout has been mandated to support biometric feedback sensors to instantly alert the medical establishment of potential threats to others.

Medical Surveillance Is Key for Controlling Outbreaks

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has partnered with the federal government's health department and launched an online portal for COVID-19 testing that will be under the auspices of Verily, its health care and life sciences arm.1

To apply for a test, you have to fill out a symptoms checklist and provide your travel history, health status and information about contact with individuals known to be infected. You must also provide a valid Google account2 — which requests a cellphone number as part of its account creation process — so your health data can be merged and you can be properly tracked through your cell phone.

For now, only those with high risk scores will be allowed to get tested.3 As reported by The Seattle Times:4

"The U.S. government is in active talks with Facebook, Google and a wide array of tech companies and health experts about how they can use location data gleaned from Americans' phones to combat the novel coronavirus, including tracking whether people are keeping one another at safe distances to stem the outbreak …

The early, unprecedented collaboration between Washington and Silicon Valley reflects the urgent, nationwide scramble to stop a deadly malady that has shuttered businesses, skewered the stock market, sent students home from school and now threatens to overwhelm the U.S. medical system with patients in need of critical care."

According to The Seattle Times,5 "dozens of engineers, executives and epidemiologists" are also urging Apple and Google to use their data-gathering expertise to "help doctors determine people who were in contact with a patient that later tested positive for coronavirus."

All of this will be rather easy with Verily's COVID-19 testing portal up and running, as having access to infection and health data, combined with the ability to track in great detail the exact whereabouts of a majority of Americans (anyone who uses the online portal).

As noted by Slate magazine, "Verily's portal may constitute the largest acquisition of U.S. health data by private companies to date." The Corona Waze will tie into and further add to all that data by relying on real-time reports from the real world. The future of infectious disease control will outweigh any potential privacy rights you may have thought existed.


Will Health Trump Privacy From Here On?

The tracking system about to be launched in the U.S. is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry.

Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities. As reported by Berggruen Institute in its March 6, 2020 article, "Tracking the Coronavirus Shows Health Will Trump Privacy":6

"'China has an edge in the ability to combine strong, top-down government directive with vibrant grassroots-level innovation,' says Shanghai-based management guru Edward Tse. 'Beyond this, China has an abundance of data to train AI-learning algorithms because of its huge population of internet users — more than 700 million.

China's thriving mobile internet ecosystem also provides a test bed for AI researchers to collect and analyze valuable demographics and transactional and behavioral big data and to conduct large-scale experiments at a much higher level than foreign counterparts' …

China's extant social monitoring systems complete the picture of what is possible … Ant Financial has developed software that color codes7,8 a person's infectious status in green (clean), yellow (caution, report to health authorities) and red (quarantine) based on responses to a questionnaire about your location, where you have been, who you have seen, if you have a cough, and so on."

On the face of it, the idea for Corona Waze appears to have been ripped straight from Ant Financial's pages. The article continues:9

"To anyone concerned with civil liberties, it is a bit scary that all this tracking information on people's location and movements is shared with the authorities and could well be used for other reasons of social control.

That is certainly an issue within the context of China's surveillance state. Yet those of us in the West should not be naïve that, when it comes to health issues, even open societies will invite these new surveillance technologies.

'The big battle in this regard in the 21st century will be between privacy and health. And health will win,' 'Homo Deus' author Yuval Harari told me in a conversation last year. 'Most people will be willing to give up their privacy in exchange for much better health care, based on 24-hour monitoring …"

In China, this monitoring includes the deployment of 5G-equipped, internet-of-things sensors that measure people's body temperature. "Anyone with a temperature above 37.3 degrees Celsius (99.14 F) could be ill," China Xinhua News says in a February 15, 2020 Twitter post, adding:10

"Check out this 5G robot that can now be found at many train stations and airports across China amid the coronavirus outbreak." Guess that means you can't run when you're late anymore, since physical exertion will raise your temperature, leading to quarantine.

Pandemic Measures Are Rapidly Eroding Privacy

The current coronavirus pandemic stands poised to dismantle personal privacy rights in a dramatic way. As reported by The New York Times, March 23, 2020:11

"In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains.

In Lombardy, Italy, the authorities are analyzing location data transmitted by citizens' mobile phones to determine how many people are obeying a government lockdown order and the typical distances they move every day. About 40 percent are moving around "too much," an official recently said.

In Israel, the country's internal security agency is poised to start using a cache of mobile phone location data — originally intended for counterterrorism operations — to try to pinpoint citizens who may have been exposed to the virus.

As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians …

Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say.

Nearly two decades later, law enforcement agencies have access to higher-powered surveillance systems, like fine-grained location tracking and facial recognition — technologies that may be repurposed to further political agendas …

'We could so easily end up in a situation where we empower local, state or federal government to take measures in response to this pandemic that fundamentally change the scope of American civil rights,' said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan."

Google Is Not Bound by Health Care Privacy Laws

Already, concerns about Google having access to people's health information through partnerships with hospitals have been raised.12 The problem isn't just that the monopoly will be able to know who's suffering from what ailment. It's that it makes its profits from selling that data to unscrupulous third parties, and takes no responsibility for how those third parties use that data. As noted in Slate magazine:13

"Neither Google nor Verily is a health care provider. They owe users none of the duties that doctors owe to patients, and federal privacy laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, do not apply.

That's a serious problem because companies can exploit people's data in surreptitious ways that violate their expectations and jeopardize their rights. Data might be shared with advertisers, sold to insurance companies, or used to calculate consumer credit scores that control access to resources."

The least harmful of these may appear to be advertisers, but while personalized targeted advertising is typically regarded as harmless, perhaps even desirable, the fact is that advertisers will be able to take advantage of people when they're at their weakest — when they're ill. This data can also be used by insurance companies and employers to secretly discriminate against individuals for any number of reasons.

China's Draconian Tracking Measures Head West

That China's draconian tracking measures are headed west is also evidenced in a March 21, 2020, Politico article14 titled "DOJ Seeks New Emergency Powers Amid Coronavirus Epidemic." In a nutshell, the Justice Department is asking for the power to "detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies" — including health pandemics. Politico reports:15

"The request raised eyebrows because of its potential implications for habeas corpus — the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release. 'Not only would it be a violation of that, but it says 'affecting pre-arrest,'' said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

'So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.'

Reimer said the possibility of chief judges suspending all court rules during an emergency without a clear end in sight was deeply disturbing. 'That is something that should not happen in a democracy,' he said."

Pandemic Necessitates Proof of Vaccination, Bill Gates Says

Evidence that we're moving into a new paradigm where personal freedom is obliterated is also presented in a March 19, 2020, Newspunch article,16 which notes: "The world as we know it will change forever in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Bill Gates, who declared that we will soon have 'digital certificates' to display our health and vaccination status."

Gates also says we need a national tracking system, and that positive tests for infectious disease must be publicly identifiable so that people will know to maintain social distance to infectious individuals. The digital certificate Gates refers to could be a tattoo made with invisible ink17,18 on a person's body, likely the forearm.

"The only catch is that you won't know exactly what is being put into your digital certificate. You also won't know who will have access to the data," Newspunch notes.19 "If history repeats, it will go from being technology adopted for its 'convenience and safety' and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family — or else."

Economic Collapse Will Likely Lead to Suicide Spike

In the wake of the economic recession that began in 2008, researchers detected a "dramatic spike in suicides," Forbes20 and Science Daily21 reported in 2014. The findings were published in the British Journal of Psychiatry June 12, 2014.22

By comparing suicide data from years before 2007 with data from 2008 until 2010, they concluded the recession had caused more than 10,000 people across the U.S., Canada and Europe to commit suicide. As noted by the authors, "Job loss, debt and foreclosure increase risks of suicidal thinking."

In the first week starting March 16, 2020, 281,000 Americans filed initial unemployment claims at the highest increase since 1992, according to CNN Business.23 For the week of March 23, Goldman Sachs economists predict another 2.25 million will file for unemployment.24

March 23, U.S. News reported25 that "James Bullard, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis … believes unemployment could hit 30% during the second quarter of the year." That's an unemployment rate exceeding even that during the Great Depression, which peaked at 24.9% in 1933.26 It seems foolish to believe the U.S. (and indeed global) suicide rate is not going to skyrocket as a result.

Is Minimizing Death Toll the Real Reason for the Shutdown?

Unemployment is predicted to reach over 30%, higher than the unemployment rates during the Great Depression that might result in a far greater loss of life than the virus ever could. Just 10 years ago, the World Health Organization came under great pressure for 'faking' a pandemic because of significant influence of the pharmaceutical companies.

The stock market has plunged and basic household necessities vanished from store shelves across the country, revealing a surprising shortage of toilet paper supply.

Naturally, every life has value and every death is tragic, but preventable medical errors kill more than 1,205 Americans PER DAY, or around 440,000 each year.

Opioid overdoses claim more than 130 people per day,30 and the pain reliever Vioxx — a single dangerous drug — killed about 60,000 patients in the five years it was on the market (1999 to 2004), as many as died in the Vietnam War, according to David Graham, associate director for science and medicine at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.31

Even if the coronavirus death toll mounts into the tens of thousands by the time all is said and done, it still doesn't compare to the death toll occurring from avoidable medical errors and frequently prescribed dangerous drugs, year in and year out.

Surely, if minimizing the annual death toll were a driving factor for radical government intervention, government and health officials would have acted to put a stop to these catastrophically high yet entirely preventable death tolls by now. Yet they never did, which suggests that minimizing mortality isn't really a determinant factor.

Why would several thousand deaths from a contagious disease be more important than the hundreds of thousands killed by government and Big Pharma every year? Why are they more important than the thousands that will commit suicide due to economic recession? It's not a matter of not caring about those who die. It's a question of why are some deaths perfectly acceptable and others justify complete removal of your rights & privacy?

If curtailing the number of deaths is not the determining factor driving this manufactured recession, then what is? Is it a test to see whether we will voluntarily surrender all of our last remaining freedoms in exchange for government, Big Pharma and the Big Tech Surveillance Capitalists "saving" us from one of many infectious diseases?

A Not So Funny April Fool's

While this is our annual April Fool's edition, 99% of it is true. The only detail that is made up is the "Corona Waze" app by Google. The World Health Organization, however, is indeed developing an app that has been described as "Waze for COVID-19."32

It appears that app would primarily be concerned with disseminating timely information and updates about COVID-19 though, although some user interactivity might be possible. Aside from that detail, everything else is actually happening.

I strongly recommend you read our April Fool's predictions from 2015, "US Government Rolls Out Mandatory Adult Vaccination and Tracking Program," and 2019, "Federal Government Mandates Vaccine Reeducation Camps — The Dystopian Future Has Arrived," to see how they've held up.

Is the current pandemic just an opportunity for consolidation and control? Every decade or so, economic collapse, taxpayer bailouts and mass consolidation occurs. It took place in 1987, 1999, 2008 and, now, 2020.

Like a good gambler, the global elitists build economic confidence by letting someone win a few rounds with a growing stock market — then take it all away, primarily through 401k and other investment accounts.

The thing is, you need a fearful populace in order to be able to take rights and freedoms away. War no longer has the desired effect, so in more recent years, the focus seems to have shifted to viral pandemics where people have at least a little bit of personal skin in the game.

MERS, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zika and, now, COVID-19 — each outbreak has brought us deeper into the controlled chaos that only fear and panic can provide — the kind of chaos that will require a total surrendering of personal rights to protect society at large; to protect ourselves from ourselves.

For those unfamiliar with Event 201, you can research this coincidental coronavirus pandemic exercise led by Bill Gates Foundation in October, 2019. The reality is the virus has been here with us for longer than we have been told, and this virus will move from northern to southern hemisphere and be a part of our regular 'cold and flu' season.

Censorship and controlled talking points are suddenly the norm. It started with banning online discussions about vaccine harms, and the same obnoxious justification — protecting public health — is now being used to censor information about coronavirus.33

Recently, Twitter has marked all Mercola.com links as 'Unsafe'. Increasingly, we're seeing more and more governments partnering to "fight misinformation." This, despite the fact that much of what's being censored is factual truth and published science. Government, Big Pharma and Big Tech are big enough to take everything you have to "give you everything you need." Or so they claim. Yet, none of them can actually help you, as an individual, from getting sick, or aid your recovery.

There are many questions worth asking at this time. If you can even temporarily suspend human rights, are there really any rights at all? If the common flu kills 40,000 people in the U.S. every year, as they claim, what will prevent every fall from requiring a pandemic emergency response? Is there ever an end?

The Theft and Sale of Human Experience

Every time you use Google search, they are really searching you — mining and extracting everything about you to turn your day-to-day, minute-by-minute experiences into profitable assets. Current day surveillance tools are stealing the Human Experience itself.

Your face, facial expression, location, your health, your family, your private conversations, your internet browsing — even walking down the street — you're tracked and monitored through your electronic devices and facial recognition systems connected through cameras throughout the global grid.

Surveillance Monopolies have taken power by filling the voids left by the fear and panic in the world. At one time, these deceptive intrusions of privacy never would have been accepted. They are partners with global powers and governments, with nearly complete access to everything in your life.

Now, all face to face events and meetings have been essentially cancelled. All meetings and correspondences are communicated through 'the web'. Kids are working from home on their Google Chromebooks, which requires a Google Gmail account - how did we let this happen?

We are about to see the largest loss of jobs and destruction of small and medium businesses since the Great Recession of the 1930s. But while crashing stock markets may spell disaster for regular folk, you can be sure that "someone" is frantically buying up assets, now available for pennies to the dollar.

The consolidation of resources into the hands of the already unimaginably rich and powerful is happening right before our eyes, all while we're giving up everything — our assets, our livelihoods, our rights, our businesses, all while every single human experience is turned into data points for profit.

Artificial intelligence is looking into the eyes of you and your children, analyzing your emotions, tracking your heartbeat, steps, sleep patterns and an unknowable number of other daily data points in order to predict every single move you're about to make.

Children nowadays have no privacy to form an identity, no space to explore without being scrutinized physically, mentally and emotionally in order for every detail of their inner and outer lives to be sold to companies that have the tools to prey on their weaknesses and manipulate their thoughts and actions for profit.

Could artificial intelligence have predicted the scenario we currently find ourselves in? You bet. Could it have created it? Without a doubt. Will we ever know the truth about it? Probably not.

If you don't think artificial intelligence has the capacity to shepherd a global population into a panic, triggering a worldwide shutdown and subsequent reallocation of wealth, you really need to review "Harvard Professor Exposes Google and Facebook."

My interview with Robert Epstein, Ph.D., senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology is also highly instructive. For the past decade he has also helped expose Google's manipulative and deceptive practices. As noted by Russ Greene in his July 20, 2019, Medium article:34

"Three trends in health and fitness are converging, leading to an Orwellian future that few may anticipate: 1) The medicalization of daily life (food, movement, sleep, etc), 2) Wearable surveillance devices, 3) Government control of health care and its data.

In combination, these trends threaten values their proponents must hold dear and believe themselves to be protecting: an individual's dignity and right to a freely-chosen private life.

If "health care" include everyone's daily life activities, and health care monitors and controls those activities through wearable devices, and the federal government controls healthcare, then the federal government will monitor and control everyone's behavior at all times. No longer will we retain a sphere of private life separate from political control. The government will be in charge. In charge, that is, of everything."

Are You Ready to Give Up EVERYTHING Over a Virus?

We are beginning to see the clear partnership of surveillance and control, preying on fears to assume rights and property. Government agencies are working for global corporations, they know the biggest fear that sells is infectious disease. The CDC has gone so far as making the comparison of infectious disease to the Zombie apocalypse. I'll end here with a pertinent excerpt from Slate magazine:35

"Should we be willing to give up some privacy for the sake of public health? Of course. It is expected that some liberties may be curtailed during national emergencies … But we cannot allow companies to use our urgent need for testing, and the distraction provided by the pandemic, to extract more data than is necessary to promote public health.

Unless we act now, such systems will become normalized. It is urgent that we set clear limitations on how Google, Verily, and participating retailers can use COVID-19 screening data …

I offer the following recommendations. The companies facilitating COVID-19 testing must make their data use practices completely transparent. They should be developing safe and reliable public health infrastructure, not proprietary trade secrets. Verily should not require people to log in to a Google account or provide a phone number in order to be screened. This information is not essential for testing.

The screening portal should not collect device, location, or IP address data, and information collected must solely be used for screening and only be shared with public health officials. Under no circumstances should it be joined with data collected by Google's many other services or shared with business partners and sister companies.

Retailers offering drive-thru testing should suspend electronic surveillance including video, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and other technologies. In response to these suggestions, some might say it's rude to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Google and Verily are volunteering time and resources to combat a pandemic. But it is not too much to ask for a government-run system. Canada's Alberta Health Services offers a screening portal that requires no login or personal information.