What is Contact Tracing?Contact tracing is the process of identification of persons who may have come into contact with an infected person ("contacts"). By tracing the contacts of infected individuals, testing them for infection, treating the infected and tracing their contacts in turn, public health aims to reduce infections in the population. Diseases for which contact tracing is commonly performed for include tuberculosis, vaccine-preventable infections like measles, sexually transmitted infections (including HIV), blood-borne infections, some serious bacterial infections, and novel infections (e.g. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2).
What is Surveillance?Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information, such as Internet traffic. Surveillance is used by governments for intelligence gathering, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. Surveillance can be viewed as a violation of privacy, and as such is often opposed by civil liberties activists.
What is a Smartphone?Smartphones are a class of mobile phones and of multi-purpose mobile computing devices. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging. Smartphones typically include various sensors that can be leveraged by their software, such as a magnetometer, proximity sensors, barometer, gyroscope and accelerometer, and support wireless communications protocols such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and satellite navigation.
Who are LifeSite?LifeSite News is a Canadian far-right Catholic advocacy website and publication.
What is Sin?In Abrahamic contexts, sin is the act of violating God's will. Sin can also be viewed as anything that violates the ideal relationship between an individual and God; or as any diversion from the ideal order for human living. To sin has been defined as "to miss the mark".
Sins fall in a spectrum from minor errors to deadly misdeeds. Catholicism regards the least corrupt sins as venial sins which are part of human living and carry immediate consequences on earth, and, if unrepented for, more painful purgation, assuming the person is destined to heaven, as it is written in the formation letter "Purgatory", "most of the early Fathers of the Church speak of a cleansing fire, though we cannot tell whether this means actual or spiritual fire."
Conversely, sins of great evil are mortal sins which bring the consequence of hell if they are not addressed either through an act of perfect contrition or going to confession about them.