TO track or not to track?

A proposed mobile phone app to trace coronavirus outbreaks via bluetooth has become a lightning rod, and not without good reason.

I get why the app's important.

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I also get governments have obliterated their credibility when it comes to privacy.

Since metadata retention laws were introduced, stories of illegal police searches keep popping up like a Whack-A-Mole.

Then there's the 2018 anti-encryption bill - shredded by cybersecurity experts but passed anyway - and the ongoing idea to turn the foreign spying agency on Australian citizens.

And now they have to sell the public on what is, at its heart, a surveillance app?

It's like asking Dracula to run a blood drive.

So I suggest a compromise.

Since the public faces stiff social distancing fines, I propose any public servant or government official caught accessing data they're not allowed to, they must be suspended, hauled to court and - if found guilty - sacked and fined $50,000? If you want the public's trust, you'd better do something to earn it.

Because when it comes to privacy protection, they have as much credibility as I have hair on the back of my head.

And it's thinning fast.