Rantz: I won’t give restaurants or Inslee my contact info for coronavirus order

I will not give any restaurant, nor Governor Jay Inslee, my personal contact information just to dine inside, despite his coronavirus mandate.

In order to partially reopen restaurants for in-house dining of Phase 2 of his plan, Inslee has placed the data collection onus on restaurants. They are required to collect the “telephone/email contact information, and time in” for every customer, kept on file for at least 30 days. The goal is for state health officials to contact individuals should they need to trace an outbreak that occurs at the restaurant.

This mandate by Inslee is not safe. It’s government overreach. And I don’t trust this administration. It’s really that simple.

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Coronavirus restaurant contact collection isn’t safe

There are serious and legitimate privacy concerns with Inslee’s over-the-top coronavirus restaurant mandate. Some of the concerns stem from his own policies that put us at risk.

Washington communities have seen an explosion of burglaries thanks to a coronavirus policy that won’t book most misdemeanor charges into jail. And the governor just released a bunch of hardened criminals from our prisons. I don’t want to deal with them breaking into a restaurant and stealing my information.

And I don’t trust Inslee when he says this coronavirus restaurant data would be private. For starters, we’re in the middle of controversy surrounding the so-called “snitch list” being published. The list contains Washingtonians reporting their neighbors for perceived violations of the stay-at-home order. It’s led to harassment of reporters and public shaming of businesses just trying to survive.

Inslee promises the coronavirus restaurant collection data will be private. But will the business dealing with the coronavirus outbreak be private?

No. And all some reporter or blogger has to do is talk to a naive staff member at a restaurant to convince them to give up some data on who might have been infected. Yes, it can work like that.

And why is the onus on the restaurant to be a secretary for the government? They’re already struggling to survive during a pandemic. Business is down. And now you’re adding another onerous requirement to a restaurant’s agenda?

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Coronavirus restaurant data collection is government overreach

The data grab is also a government overreach, made especially worse because they’re holding the future of a business hostage. If you don’t collect coronavirus data on behalf of the Inslee administration, you don’t get to reopen your restaurant. This is outrageous.

But we also don’t know if the data will be abused. They say it’ll be used for contact tracing. Great. But how far is Inslee willing to go to protect the lives of Washingtonians? Because he’s already abused his power in his coronavirus stay-at-home order.

Inslee demands guns shops be closed, even though you have a constitutional right to own a gun. His order led to a paper arrest of a grandma who wanted to let kids enjoy a local park. If you say you want to safely and responsibly reopen the economy a bit faster than he would like, he’ll accuse you of wanting to kill people.

What will Inslee do with this kind of contact information in an increasingly desperate-sounding effort to contain the virus? Privacy activists sounded the alarms last month when it came to the related idea of cell phones being used for contact tracing.

“There are obviously significant civil liberties implications,” former director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project Shankar Narayan told sister station KIRO Radio’s Gee and Ursula Show. “This is a large scale collection of location information and other data, potentially about people.”

“There’s the involvement of both government and private actors, where we may not have control over how they use the data — they may not use the data in ways that are transparent to people,” he added.

Restaurateur speaks out

Dan Austin is a Seattle restaurateur that’s struggling to survive, like so many others. He wasn’t happy with the guidance. Inslee’s 50% occupancy policy doesn’t make much business sense and many believe he’s presiding over a prolonged death of most restaurants.

Still, Austin wants to make the Phase 2 guidance work for his West Seattle restaurant Peel and Press. But the data collection rubs him the wrong way.

“I think there’s a lot of personal responsibility being dodged [by Inslee] by putting it on to the business,” Austin tells the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “You can’t put a signup sheet out in the lobby, people signing when they walk in, because you have to have 100% sanitized pens and make sure that clipboard is wiped down in between everything.”

For Austin, he also finds it somewhat useless because he doesn’t think anyone will even give him accurate information. He suspects customers will just give him a fake email address and phone number, either out of privacy concerns or fear they’ll be signed up for some unsolicited marketing. And if the KTTH text line is any indication, he’ll get lots of customers signing their names as Jay Inslee.

“I just don’t feel comfortable collecting my customers’ information in that fashion,” he concedes.

There’s a much better way

I won’t give my info. I know that means not eating out at restaurants, something I enjoy doing, because I don’t want to give out a fake email address or phone number. It’s unfortunate because I would like to help the struggling restaurant industry. And I really could use a good night out with a friend, instead of video chats and texting.

But I do have a better way to contain the virus without infringing on privacy rights: Let adults be adults.

Ask Washingtonians to track their own whereabouts and commit to posting detailed information online about any outbreak. I’ll help you promote the website on-air, and I know my colleagues will as well. We don’t want to see any outbreak, even though Inslee uses that sleazy attack to bully people into ceasing their dissent.

We’re getting to the point where I think the data justifies letting adults make responsible decisions for themselves. This seems like a good opportunity to tell the public you actually trust them.

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