GOVERNMENT staff snoop inside your bins week-in week-out, supermarkets track and report your every purchase, cameras record your outdoor movements and your online habits are permanently logged. 

Such spying is happening right now on almost every Australian and, under the guise of Coronavirus, it’s about to become a whole lot worse. 

Most people are aware the primary purpose of supermarket loyalty programs is to record your purchases and on-sell this valuable data to marketeers, insurance companies and, when needed, to governments. 

SMOKERS

If you’ve recently bought cigarettes, odds are your health and life insurance companies already know.

They’ll also be aware who you purchased them from, how often and what you paid if you used your loyalty or credit card to do so. You can forget about your life insurance payout if you’ve been avoiding their smokers’ premium.

Red light, roadside, toll booth and speed cameras monitor and log vehicle movements all day every day. Number plate recognition technology has alleviated any need for governments to illegally spy on you using GPS tracking.

Household garbage bins now carry identifying bar codes while rubbish trucks have installed cameras that record everything that falls from your bin. Ask your council. For many of them, spying has become common practice. Alternately, just look for the barcode they’ve snuck onto your bin.

SECURITY

CCTV street cameras and banking auto-tellers are recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

These cameras are monitored around the clock by people in high-security bunkers located on Sydney’s northern beaches with armed security teams on stand-by and ready to roll.

If you’re planning on doing something embarrassing (or illegal) avoid doing so near an auto-teller. With half a dozen cameras and sensors, photographs of drug deals, assaults and other strange street activities regularly make their way to police.

But that was last year’s spying. In the name of public health, 2020 is something else altogether.

Authorities bursting into private homes and hostels has become the new norm. How did it come to this?

DRONES

Australian privacy laws have become meaningless. If anything, they do no more than restrict citizens from accessing their own information – while giving any corporation or government department limitless spying rights.

There’s now talk of drones, facial recognition software and draconian (and inconsistent) movement restrictions.

The problem with all this is while they appear okay during an emergency, particularly one the size of COVID-19, the spying is never repealed once the emergency is over.

Federal Liberal MP Jason Falinski [main picture] has raised concerns.

He said he was uncomfortable with how the Coronavirus regulations where being enforced.

“This is a major infringement on a free and fair society and we can’t endure that for long,” Mr Falinski said.

“You cannot have in a free society the movement of people being subject to confinement and monitoring in that way.

“It is anathema to the country that we live in.”PC