The privacy of individuals in Israel has been on its last legs way before the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
It was our fear of boredom combined with the easy access to information that had prompted us to reveal more and more of ourselves without realizing there is no such thing as a free lunch.
If we want to participate in the game of online existence by downloading yet another meaningless app to see what we would look like in 30 years, we must be ready to pay the price.
Now, under the guise of what the World Health Organization is calling "The worst crisis since WWII," fear of completely losing our privacy has become a real possibility.
In Israel, due to the sensitive national security situation, the government already has the power to intrude into our lives, and now that we're waging a war against coronavirus, that power has grown even bigger.
The concerns over the loss of privacy, meanwhile, are silenced in the coronavirus-related cacophony emanating from our televisions and mobile phones. Who has time to worry about the Shin Bet security agency's use of our personal information when we could all catch an infectious disease?
Defense Minister Naftali Bennett recently proposed combining the resources of the military with those of the defense industry and an unnamed private intelligence company, to categorize people according to their susceptibility to COVID-19 and the probability of spreading it to others.
The unnamed private company is reported to be the controversial NSO which has been implicated in human rights violations and said to have supplied the Saudi regime with information that lead to the assassination of the kingdom's dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Bennett is making the best of his reputation as an innovator who thinks outside the box after he successfully sold two high-tech companies and became a wealthy man. He is also presenting himself as an alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
So far, the minister's initiative has been stopped because of legal concerns but the general lack of opposition from the public is telling, yet we look in awe at China's monitoring of its citizens ostensibly to prevent the spread of COVID–19.
A report in the British newspaper the Guardian this week, investigated how apps developed to monitor civilians at this time are collecting information behind the scenes that can be used by regimes to tighten their hold on their populations.
History has taught us that any tool used by totalitarian rulers makes its way to democratic societies, certainly when they are fighting a health crisis.
We, of course, opt to overcome the pandemic and stay alive as our privacy is proclaimed dead.