Incidentally, if you have a business registered for GST in Australia you have to submit a quarterly activity statement. The tax office website had bizarre authentication requirements but the browser plugin was at least cross-platform. They now require you to use the myGovID app, which is - you guessed it - available only on the App Store and Play Store. You can't even run a business without being part of the duopoly. https://www.mygovid.gov.au/
When I was in grad school, the university's Student Union provided an extended health insurance plan. To get a reimbursement, you had two options for submitting a claim: (1) Paper forms submitted via the student union or (2) the insurance company's app which was only for Apple devices. The app's only functionality was to facilitate taking a photo (of a receipt) and uploading that photo, along with the user's details. While I've heard that they now have a Google Play app, I still have zero understanding of why they don't simply have a website where one can upload a photo and associated details.
For many people, it's too complicated (as in, they don't know how) to transfer a photo into their computer and then upload it separately. Integrating a camera in the app is far easier.
Nowadays you can trigger the camera app from a website and get the image data directly in your web, making the experience of uploading a photo the same as any installed app.
We're living in a time where if you don't have a mobile phone you can't complete the online form and therefore the transaction becomes impossible. This is even worse if you're on the phone and the person on the other end of the phone that works for the company is the one filling in the digital form.
The fact that its now further embedded in an app. owned by international conglomerates is hardly suprising. They're slowly losing what control they had.
Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology. There are too many things understood by too few people for sensible decisions to be made, let alone worrying about do these things age well and just add to the behemoth of red tape^H^H^H^H digital bureaucratic cloud storage.
Paper systems didn't have these problems (although they certainly had some disadvantages).
The ACCC is one of Australia's few good independent bodies, but pretty much all of the others have had their funding greatly reduced over time. Whatever good ideas they come up with just get ignored a lot of the time, because corruption pays and ineptitude is normalised. The financial watchdog is basically toothless at this point.
The Robodebt scheme [1] is just one of their recent screwups. Interestingly, there's now something similar that's come to light regarding Post Office budgets in the UK from a few decades ago.
"Governments are incapable of doing sensible things involving ever changing technology."
- I moved to Australia about 4 years ago. I'm pretty convinced that the Australian Gov is much ahead in regards to tech adoption compared to most places in EU and US. In my 4+ years in Oz, I had to visit an offline institution exactly 3 times (you can do almost everything online). Everything's been flawless, super easy and very well integrated - from procuring various docs to submitting a tax return.
- Yes, we can always find something that could be improved; however, if you compare how things are run in Oz to most other countries, you will find out it's much ahead.
Its all fine until you have to complain about something going wrong and it becomes very trying to comply with whatever they need despite it being their fault.
I got stuck in a bureaucratic loop because an OCR reader interpreted a 0 as an 8. The fact that the automated process changed status and started throwing more forms at me, even though none it makes sense in context. Just because it was programmed that way. I still get them. Filling in forms with 0's is easier than dealing with people who insist I should be getting them in the first place (one person worked out what had happened, but transferred me to another department to get it fixed where I inevitably had the internal phone system fail and hang up on me. The horrible hold music/talk experience where they tell you how wonderful everything is just makes me loathe to attempt it again.
These things should happen less when human judgement is involved rather than cause-effect programming.
You may be right though - I can't speak for many overseas systems.
I did also get stuck in the UK tax system. They were sending me threatening letters, ironically I had to fill in multiple years worth of forms to escape the system even though I was in another country, and then they eventually worked out they owed me money.
Then there were the server failures due to load, for a specific online petition. Noone cared, but it was basically due to using old MS technology called Webforms which creates gargantuan data blobs per user/session called ViewState, which ran the servers out of memory. I think the online census submissions process had a similar issue too.
I do agree its nice to deal with these things from home rather than queue in some official building somewhere though.
Maybe I just have a natural tendency to attract flies to bypewriters or something. Maybe I'm bitter because I've built entire sites for the government only for them to throw the lot away once it was done, because the site might make them look bad.
I'm just very aware of the downsides of over-automation. If you're a valid case, but the existing system doesn't cater to you, then you become the problem rather than the system being the problem.
Anyway, I still think its awesome that the ACCC noticed this entanglement and brought it to peoples attention, and are one of the few indepedent bodies left that have some teeth.
Except now people like me will refuse to use phone support and email/mail/tweet their PR/CEO/whoever to resolve the issue, which are all likely more expensive than proper support staff.
Yeah, this works. You feel kind of bad, but you value your time in helping them fix whatever problem you have using their product/service.
Sometimes I've known exactly what the problem is and don't want to jump through the hoops of level 1 help to get to level 2 to get to level 3 which can take hours but can be mitigated by outlining the problem in a public forum you know they have reps montoring, and its resolved in minutes. You can still achieve this reasonably politely and thank them afterwards and its actually a good outcome for both parties.
The most important aspect for me is that most services can be accessed via a web browser, and I see no reason why an app would be a smart choice for a government to deploy going forward. Web apps can achieve everything a native app can for the purposes of government administration.
I think the ACCC actually hasn't been that great for a while, unfortunately. We have awesome consumer protection, but they've made serious missteps more recently, especially under their current commissioner, Rod Simms.
They made a terrible ruling forcing the NBN to have 121 points of interconnect (basically peering POPs) back in 2009 (originally, NBN Co wanted to have 14), to protect the seven or so long-distance fibre providers. In the meantime, these providers merged with each other so now we only have three, and the 121 POI policy made it extremely difficult for smaller ISPs to compete on the NBN, because most couldn't afford transit to all of them, so we saw huge consolidation in the ISP space. So the ACCC ruling directly caused a reduction in competition in the ISP space, and it didn't help prevent what they were trying to prevent in the transit market either!
Then, look to the insanity of the media bargaining code. May have been some coercion from some Government donors behind the scenes there, who knows... But at the end of the day, which there were some legitimate concerns about Google and Facebook, most of their conclusions didn't really make sense (they conflated what actually happens, where Google and Facebook publish a link and one-sentence excerpt as if it was the same as publishing the whole article, and their solution was to force Google and Facebook to pay money to the big media organisations, which just happen to be big donors of the political party in power). The resulting law was so bad that Facebook threatened to pull out of the country altogether and removed news from Australian timelines for a while, until the bill was watered down.
In terms of these policies, the ACCC strikes me as not having a great deal of competence, but at the same having huge delusions of grandeur. I really don't want to see another episode like the tiff with Facebook, where even though Facebook do super scummy things and I generally dislike them, in that circumstance they were absolutely in the right...
I vaguely recall being angry at the ACCC about a bunch of other things over the years, but I can't remember any specifics - will have to try and look it up. I think it was blocking some mergers that wouldn't have reduced competition, but then approving some that posed potential serious damaging consequences to the market etc.
At least there's still a bunch trying to do the right thing by the people as a whole rather than the people currently in charge. I agree the ACCC has been a little hit and miss lately, but its one of the few good things we still have. I'm really hoping they leave medicare alone as much as possible.
Then again, somehow Newscorp got their way vs. facebook/google - only fair the ACCC does too.
You are forgetting the number of democratic countries which forced their COVID app from Appstore/Playstore on their citizens. They came short of calling it mandatory download but mandated the app as entry pass for several services.
You don't use a monopoly powered smartphone? You cannot afford a phone at all? Tough luck buddy(/s).
Only reason these COVID pass apps didn't stick around in the democratic countries is because the apps didn't do what's it's supposed to do; Ironically because the app couldn't be made mandatory download thereby not achieving the critical mass.
Having a web app as well would have been slightly better, especially if it works in feature phones(In several developing countries feature phone usage is lot higher than smartphones even then they didn't publish a web app) but still doesn't help those who doesn't use a phone at all(whatever the reason might be).
Distribute free phones which is capable of running these COVID apps and then the issue comes down to just privacy.
Alternate physical form seems reasonable.
*just : Not to reduce the importance of privacy(EFF commentary in my other comment).
I am not sure why people are shocked that this kind of thing would happen in democratic societies. People seem to have a rose colored view of democracy, and believe it is synonymous with freedom... it is not
Democracies can be just as tyrannical as any other forms of government, doubly true when the people in that democracy have replaced the desire for freedom, with the desire for safety which most societies in the world today have less desire to be free, and more of a desire to be safe; falsely believing they can actually trade freedom for safety.
Not going to name countries and trigger a slugfest. But will include the List of countries with official contact tracing apps[1] and you can search for which services those apps were mandated. EFF commentary on these apps[2].
There's no point to this. If you're going to call out a group for behavior, you should be willing to state their name. You didn't avoid a slugfest, you just confused the issue ye being ambiguous for no reason. The only negative consequences here are a few lost points, and you get that already for making allusions rather than statements with evidence, and providing a list of countries that have tracking apps is not evidence that any of those countries mandated its use.
If the consequences for you are larger than that because you think your country is somehow monitoring your statements, I doubt being vague like this actually helps and you could always supply some other country as evidence, since your statements imply there are multiple.
I presume you haven't read my other comment about the search query. Search for 'COVID app mandatory for' and depending upon your location the results will be either only about your country or the *countries/states which you're asking for.
I assumed the statements I made about COVID app mandatory for services in many countries was a common knowledge. I failed to account that not many keep tabs on stuff happening outside their own country and that many believe the democratic freedoms they enjoy is universal.
Couple of up votes is not worth it to put up with nationalist terrorists. Free speech cannot be taken for granted every where.
My country (Iceland) has an official contact tracing app listed there. It was developed by volunteers and contributed to the government and the source is open on github. Nothing you said applies to it.
Searching for mandatory and required turned up Hong Kong (required the app for entering restaurants) and Qatar (mandated when leaving the house). I don't think this is what OP was refering to.
Please search instead by 'COVID app mandatory for'; depending upon your location the results might vary i.e. if you are from one of those countries then all the search results in the front page would be about just your country and where as if you are not then you will get different countries/states which has mandated COVID app for some service.
If the former is true for you, it didn't mean I meant your country alone in my original comment.
> Please search instead by 'COVID app mandatory for';
In case I can save anyone else the time I spent, I initially read this as op saying that I should search for the phrase 'COVID app mandatory for' in one of the two articles op previously linked [1][2]. This phrase does not show up in either link.
I believe op is suggesting that I google this phrase but I think I already have spent too much time on this.
In India, 3 major tax departments force you into proprietary software via
1. Gst department makes json data which enables third party devs to prepare stuff but government utilities are in "excel" format only.
2. Income tax department had return utilities in "excel" form and also a "Java" which never worked outside of windows. Now they have made a sleek electron app and guess what, windows only.
3. MCA, companies registrar forces users to upload forms in "adobe PDF" because it has inbuilt forms and validation and such. Absolutely no way to use other than windows.
Now, there are around 50 mil taxpayers in India and if the government wanted, they can switch them to Foss products in an instant but Microsoft lobby is huge.
Not that it benefits Microsoft, I for one have never paid for a Microsoft product, thanks to keygens. Still,
Just responding to this comment because all the comments below it seem to be tone deaf and are just complaining about Governments.
BAS (and all tax documents) can still be submitted via a Tax Agent or via Mail. There is no "lock in". Chances are if you own a computer, you own an android and an apple phone, who cares.
However I am still worried that governments basically make us choose between 1/ buying in into this duopoly, or 2/ using slower, decade-old processes. It feels like if you want to stay up to date with society, you actually have no real choice.
I mean, those apps could certainly be open-source and distributed through F-Droid as well. In Republic, these are "public things" after all.
As an Australian overseas I can guarantee you that it is nigh impossible to have dealings with most federal agencies without using that app.
It's one of the few closed source apps I have on my phone and forces me to install a workaround like yalp in order to get it. (playstore requires a google login to use)
