The leadership of the Chinese Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has ordered the airline Cathay Pacific that its crew members must use a special app. This records all locations and is intended to be used for monitoring after the return of international flights.

The procedure is not without controversy, to say the least, because it is officially stated that crew members must undergo a two-week medical surveillance after international service. During the first seven days, all locations and activities are to be documented automatically. According to an internal circular, the “Crew Activity Log App” from Cathay Pacific is used. This was specially developed for use.

But that's not all: in addition to monitoring and the obligation to make entries in the "Leave Home Safe App", employees must also enter or transfer the data to the crew app during the first seven days. You have to state in detail when you left the house, with whom you met and of course also give a reason. Furthermore, both the airline and the leadership of the special administrative region want to have regular entries on the state of health.

This data collection frenzy is not entirely new, as there was already a form. This had to be completed on paper and was therefore far less powerful than an app, which can use GPS and other methods to record the exact location of the airline employee at any time. There is also a completely absurd circumstance: the previous seven-day quarantine that flying personnel had to comply with after flights abroad has been reduced to three days. Nevertheless, you want to collect location data of the crew members for at least a week.

The official justification for the compulsion, because Cathay Pacific threatens workers with “serious consequences” if they don’t comply, is that they have to comply with the quarantine regulations of the Chinese special administrative region leadership. It is also believed that the app would not violate any data protection regulations, as it would collect the data required by the authorities.

A spokeswoman for the airline said: “The company only collects the data required by the relevant government agency. We take the privacy of our employees seriously. We have ensured that these precautions are in line with government requirements and relevant data protection regulations.”