Posted 14 мая 2020,, 08:20

Published 14 мая 2020,, 08:20

Modified 24 декабря 2022,, 22:37

Updated 24 декабря 2022,, 22:37

Social monitoring: How Moscow mocks quarantined patients

Social monitoring: How Moscow mocks quarantined patients

14 мая 2020, 08:20
How to help a coronavirus sufferer if the hospital runs out of space? Send a person to self-medication at home. For the reliability, ask to make selfies in bed every 20 minutes (at night too). Invent the new fines, fines, fines.

One missed photo session - 4 thousand from your purse. If you want to argue in court - a fine for leaving the apartment.

Julia Suntsova

Such a plan to save patients has been practicing since last week by the Moscow City Hall. Sounds like a joke? While you are surprised, not only coronavirus patients are locked up in a digital concentration camp, but also everyone with SARS, seasonal allergies, runny nose and suspicions of these.

Muscovites placed in home quarantine began to receive decisions from the Main Control Directorate of Moscow on bringing to administrative responsibility and fines for misuse of the Social Monitoring application.

The program was developed by the Moscow Mayor's Office to monitor patients with confirmed COVID-19 transferred to home aftercare. On May 10, the application was charged with fines.

Patients in home quarantine are required to install “Social Monitoring” on their phone, if there is no device, then the city hall delivers ... no, not medicine, not oxygen, not material help, as you might think, but tablets with a preinstalled program!

Your business is not to try to get out of the clutches of the disease, but to send a selfie to the program for each of its requirements. And she often requires - several times a day.

The application asks you to upload a photo to confirm your location, the patient's location is controlled by GPS. Some patients complain that push notifications buzz every 20 minutes from 9am to 10pm. Report to the digital overseer immediately. God forbid the patient to nap for an hour or to bring his body to the soul, the patient must always watch - otherwise, the account in the State Services.

- A notification comes about the need to be identified. This means that within an hour you need to go in and take a picture of your inverted face. With flash. The flash is built into the application and does not turn off. You sleep, your body aches from temperature, you have bloody diarrhea - [anyway]. Be kind, set aside your business and identify. When I was sick, I slept for 18 hours. Because she had the audacity not to take pictures for half a day, she was fined, ”says Yesya Selivanova.

In a matter of days, the Social Monitoring app on Google Play and the App Store has become the country's main political platform.

Hundreds of people in quarantine are discussing the adequacy of state support measures, human rights and freedoms, wish the government a long life, mainly obscene and slogans.

“I hope that the last thing you see before death is a camera flash when you take a photo,” people write messages to officials who came up with the application.

Because of the holes in the developers to use the program - the test is not easy, even for people who are completely healthy.

Muscovites install the application for several days. When you upload a photo, the system freezes. The program sends fines not violating the regime, sitting at home until the last. And he continues to send them to those who are already being taken out on a stretcher (he left the apartment!) It is not easy to get rid of rabid Tamagotchi even after discharge from the hospital and the end of the quarantine period.

I couldn’t download the application, I couldn’t register, the office didn’t work, the photo didn’t load, I didn’t have time to send one out of ten photos a day, the program wasn’t available for download in the market — your problems, the fine comes anyway. The application does not work even on devices issued by the mayor's office. Patients call “Social Monitoring” a form of mockery.

- They called a doctor, they took smears from the whole family. Issued a decree on two-week quarantine. We practiced in good faith daily 8 requests for “Social Monitoring”. The doctor said if they do not call, the test is negative. They didn’t call. On the 15th day with a clear conscience we left for the cottage, the program was deleted. But SMS with the requirements of the photo continues to this day. I spent three hours a day to get through to the support service. They said they would call the clinic to be deregistered. The clinic said that the results on the phone do not say - come in person or wait two or three weeks until they reach the post office. And so in a circle. We are waiting for the next fines, ”says Dinara Gadelshina.

The whole family has not been able to get rid of digital terrorism for 24 days, even with negative analyzes on hand.

People of all genders, ages, and social status are kneaded.

The head of the party’s monitoring and analysis department, Yabloko Vladimir Perevalov, did not find out if he had a coronavirus or not, because he did not receive any other messages from officials besides SMS with the requirement to send a selfie.

On April 19, he called an ambulance because of the rising temperature, and 10 days later he received an SMS informing him that he was obliged to register with Social Monitoring. He couldn’t download the application on the iPhone using the attached link, as the link turned out to be broken. Vladimir did not reach the hotlines. As soon as the application appeared on the App Store , he immediately downloaded it, verified it and began sending photo reports. On the Gosuslug portal, three fines of 4 thousand rubles at once fell off. The Main Control Directorate of Moscow, who wrote them down, did not comment on the violations at all, only bills for payment were sent to the office.

- I sat at home all days with two human witnesses and one feline, did not leave the apartment until May 3, as the doctors told me, nor after. During this time, they never called me - neither doctors , nor control services, no one came, did not check my parents and my health, I fulfilled all the requirements for self-isolation, and as a result I owed 12,000 rubles to my hometown , ”Perevalov says.

Application "Social Monitoring", though, and requests full access to the phone, do not give notice of inspection time - check you can go only if you have time you come into the office, and that means it's time - never explained, he adds.

- That is, I have to sit with the phone in my hands and constantly go into the application - but what if, for example, I sleep during the day? P hy would a sick person does not sleep? Or why should he not work, once even locked up in quarantine, he needs to somehow earn a living? - says the political activist.

Elena Ladyzhnikova in quarantine had to master the skills of a programmer alone and from scratch. Unlike other people, she doesn’t even have a theoretical chance of technical support. The application involves only voice assistance, and Elena is deaf. The application does not take into account the nature of communication with people with disabilities, but they send fines to them regularly.

- I was discharged on May 1, I was still weak, recovering. I was asked to sign the consent to tracking in quarantine prior to discharge. At home, in a couple of days, an SMS arrived, in which they asked to connect their smartphone / tablet to the program via the link. And do not care that I do not have them or that I do not know how to use them. And do not care, I'm deaf - phone to communicate with a service driven in the city, and another opportunity to contact tech support there. Thanks to friends who asked me to bring a smartphone for several days. They brought it, and the quest began. When turned on, only one window opens - take a photo online. And I click on this green key , and nothing happens , but again the window "take a photo" appears and that's it. I tormented all evening. I try from half past eight in the morning, overloaded the smartphone twice. Battery recharged . And again the “no internet” window. This is a mockery of people , says Elena.

It is scary to imagine how blind or immobilized people will conduct dialogue with soulless machines.

How did we end up in this theater of the absurd?

- When you start talking with a doctor, you simply sign a paper, nobody explains anything to you, because the doctor himself doesn’t understand anything, he says that they are being demanded of them. If you suddenly refuse and demand clarification, they start to scare you with three-person observers, police, and other women! Personally, I burst into tears. Intimidating a sick person is, of course, the first thing to do, ”says Yesya Selivanova.

People subscribe to Social Monitoring also because when they are forced into a scared observer, they are much more likely to pick up COVID-19 than in all other cases.

In fact, there is nowhere to complain about causeless fines. Only lucky people manage to reach technical support, and no one has yet succeeded in lifting sanctions through the call center. “They say: it’s all the Moscow Government or an automatic machine, or they just say that this issue is not for them,” users say.

The Social Monitoring application is littered with negative reviews in the markets, everyone calls it crooked and inoperative and does not give more than 1 star. In the capital’s mayor’s office they say that a mistake in calculating fines is “unlikely”.

The head of the Main Control Directorate of Moscow, Evgeny Danchikov, argues his confidence in the reliability of the system by saying that “not a single one of the 35 thousand fines has yet been appealed.” The citizen disagrees with the fines, the official proposes to receive the decision by mail and appeal it to the court within 10 days (!). Nothing in this recommendation of Yevgeny Danchikov confuses. Neither that a seriously ill patient is put on the counter by the day, nor that the patient himself must prove that he is not a giraffe. Apparently, Danchikov does not seem to recall the danger posed to those around him by an infected person forced to wander around the city, lawyers and courts. All of this, just recall, officials call protection measures against the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, with a flick of the wrist, the patient tracking app with COVID-19 is elegantly turning into a total surveillance tool.

Everyone who had the courage these days to go to the hospital with something like a cold will fall into the digital collar.

Doctors began to speak openly about this. W avotdeleniem GBUZ City Hospital №40 Andrey Grishkovets warns what will happen if you come to the clinic with symptoms of colds.

- A doctor will come to you and write out a certificate of incapacity for work. You will not be allowed to leave the apartment for two weeks, your face will be included in urban tracking systems. Removing this person from the base will be extremely difficult, if at all possible. There is no deadline for automatic tracking — until the system decides that you can stop monitoring you, ”he says.

A person who complains about SARS automatically falls under the "Social Monitoring". If you can’t install it, or it will “fall”, the system will fine you every day until you install or adjust its work. No warnings - an automatic fine of 4 thousand. If your condition requires hospitalization - the system will decide that you left the room and will fine you. You will prove in court later that you were hospitalized. To do this, you need to get all the fines, but you can’t leave the house. With a high degree of probability, you will not be able to get through - all the “hot lines” are overloaded, the staff cannot answer many questions. The system can help your health only in one case - if high-flow oxygen is required. Everything else is an illusion, - the head of the medical institution sums up.

Is there any hope that the Moscow authorities will finally send their ingenuity to help the sick, and will not punish them in any way for the fact that they are sick? - Patients in digital shackles are asking a fair question. And even more so beyond the bounds of understanding - well, how can one rip off money from people just suspicious of a virus who voluntarily sat down for half a month in a safe quarantine for the sake of the hypothetical safety of those around them - and for what? For not having time to send a selfie ...

Automatic awarding of fines has become possible due to recent changes to the Code of Administrative Offenses of Moscow. The amendments allow to punish patients “without trial and even” and even without their participation - only on the basis of data from “technical devices and software”.

Lawyer Ivan Yezhikov , who announced help with a fined “Social Monitoring”, urges people to appeal against the decisions.

- People are fined under Art. 3.18.1 Code of Administrative Offenses of Moscow for failure to register in the program. These fines, as well as the very idea of holding accountable through the program, are illegal. According to the laws of the Russian Federation, an administrative offense is recorded solely by drawing up a protocol and only in the presence of the person against whom the case is brought. Until now, there was only one exception to the rule - parking on the lawn was automatically documented by means of technical means with the functions of photo and video shooting. Clever men from the mayor's office decided that they could do everything and extended the automatic fixation to Chapter 3 “ADMINISTRATIVE OFFENSES, COMBATING PUBLIC ORDER AND PUBLIC SECURITY”.

Moreover, they didn’t give a damn about the provision of the federal code, which says that it is possible to record violations only with the help of certified and verified equipment. They decided to mock the law in full and allowed themselves to write fines through ordinary city video surveillance and generally by all available means. That is, everything, now you can fix any kind of violations associated with the coronavirus, they decided in the city hall, and the Moscow City Duma deputies joyfully wrote this into the law, - says Ivan Yezhikov.

The lawyer observes that just fixing a violation is not enough. In order to be held accountable, as the law dictates, it is still necessary to prove the guilt of a person, that is, an action conscious or committed through negligence, which led to a violation. No application of evidence of guilt can provide.

A month ago, on the Internet, they laughed at a meme, where police officers joyfully ran with batons at people: “Beat, fine, imprison”. A thoughtful observer asked the fleeers, "How will this help in the fight against coronavirus"? The policemen looked around in bewilderment and asked again: "With which coronavirus?" Sobyanin’s team today seemed to join the runners with clubs.

Will the mayor’s office be held accountable for “initiative”? And who will return to the already rapidly impoverished people 35 thousand written-out quitrents?

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