Less than a week after the UK government walked back its plans to trial vaccine passports at the FA Cup final at Wembley, an internal job ad has revealed that the invasive tech is still being developed.
The job ad, which was obtained by Guido Fawkes, states:
“We are developing solutions that will prove people’s vaccine and test status in order to allow the reopening of the economy.
NHSX is developing both digital and non-digital options to enable UK residents to assert their Covid status, including both vaccination history and test results.”
It also notes that applicants will be required to start on Tuesday, May 4, 2021 and that the employment length will be six months.
The publication of this ad is the latest of several vaccine passport pushes by the UK government in recent months. In addition to the FA Cup final vaccine passport trial that was later walked back, government-funded technology companies have developed facial scanning software that checks people’s coronavirus data and when they enter venues.
Related: ? The (lack of) ethics of coronavirus passports
While the UK government is consistently pushing vaccine passport tech, the introduction of coronavirus tracking tech around the world has raised major concerns.
Lax security protocols that have made it easy for random individuals to steal other people’s data under some vaccine passport implementations and reports of data being sold to third parties under previous contact tracing schemes have highlighted the privacy risks under such schemes.
The implementation of this invasive tech also erodes people’s pre-pandemic freedom to visit premises without having to prove their COVID-19 vaccination or test status.
Additionally, vaccine passports give even more control to tech companies and governments that have used the pandemic to restrict people’s movements, gather more data, and control what they say online.
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