Leaders’ Declaration puts a handbrake on global digital currencies, includes usual ‘let’s use the internet and AI to make the world a better place’ stuff
Chinese president Xi Jinping appears to have offered the world the QR code powered system used to determine movement rights inside his nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s scheme sees citizens use an app to generate a colour-coded QR code. Those whose phones display a green code are allowed entry into public places after permitting the code to be scanned. An orange code sees citizens sent to a fortnight of home quarantine and a red code sees them dispatched to hospital or secure quarantine facility ASAP. Status is determined based on contact-tracing, data from local health authorities and other unspecified sources, but the exact methods for assigning colors are opaque. The scheme was co-developed by Chinese web giants Alibaba and Tencent and introduced in early February. It has since become ubiquitous, racked up billions of uses and is now to be adopted in Hong Kong.
