These cameras are also being forcibly installed inside church buildings, including over their doors, offering boxes, and Bible-selling counters. (Persecution against Christians in China is increasing. Their government says Christianity is foreign and evil.)
Last Thursday I visited our car insurance company. I wanted help to set up their “drive safe and save” app on my new cell phone. Drive Safe and Save is an app that is “paired” with a “beacon” --an innocuous looking little square plastic thing-- that we put into our glove box and it tracks how well we drive. The better we drive the more discount we get on our insurance.
My previous cell phone did not have a compass so the app didn’t work on it. But my new phone is more advanced and has a compass so John thought I could probably get the app to work on it.
I called them on the phone earlier that day to ask how to do it. But when I pushed the button on the beacon like the girl said to do, its little red light didn’t light up and the app on the phone didn’t do anything. So, I went into the office to see if they could make it work.
The girl kept pushing the button and nothing happened. She asked me to check the trip log in the app to see if any of the trips were mine. The trip log shows a map and the route taken for each trip, and the time, date and distance. It also grades the driver for acceleration, braking, speed, cornering and phone use. It doesn’t show which car was used though. So, it was a bit of a puzzle to figure out if any of them were mine. (They probably have that info somewhere since they know how much discount to apply to each car.)
After analyzing the log as well as I could I determined that it was only showing my husband’s car. Hmm, I thought, if I was ever suspicious, I could use this to check up on where he was going.
After what seemed an unnecessarily long time, while she continued to push the button and asked me a few more times if any of the trips were mine, she finally said the beacon wasn’t working and she would order a new one for me. She also said if it was working it would have shown my trip to their office.
Afterwards I thought, how ironic, I was shocked by how the Chinese government is tracking their people’s every move, but I just spent all that time intentionally to make sure that my trips can be tracked. All for a discount on our car insurance!
Anything to save money, I thought, I guess that’s the American way.
Yesterday after I wrote that, I thought more about why we are so trusting as to let someone track our trips like that. It’s not really because we care more about saving money than anything else. It’s because we trust that our information will not be misused. Why? Are we just all hopelessly ignorant and naive? Well maybe we are a little. But generally, it’s because we don’t expect our government to use our information against us because, unlike China, our government hasn’t made a habit of doing that. Why is that? I believe it is because our laws and society, for the most part, are based on Christian principles. Things like honesty, justice, "love thy neighbor" and "do unto others what you would have them do unto you." That is the American way. Long may that continue!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christians-religious-persecution-translation-bible
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