Thai Chana

» see thaichana.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Thailand had been locked down for two months when the order came to let the department stores open again. The condition attached to that order was Thai Chana, ไทยชนะ, which translates as Thais win. Shop registration opened at six in the morning on Sunday 17 May 2020, and by the end of that first day more than forty-four thousand businesses had signed up and more than two million people had scanned in.

The mechanics were a QR code taped by the door. You scanned on the way in and scanned again on the way out, through the website or the Android app. The record went into a closed database that only the Department of Disease Control at the Ministry of Public Health could read. It was built by Krungthai Bank together with the Digital Government Development Agency, which is an unusual pairing: a state-owned commercial bank holding the check-in log for an entire country.

The stated purpose had two halves. One was crowding, so a venue could see how full it was and manage the door. The other was contact tracing, so that when somebody tested positive the ministry could work out who had been standing near them. The first half worked. The second is the part people argue about.

~ the dossier ~

~ check in, check out ~

The final version of the homepage, captured in May 2022, is almost exactly the page from launch day: the line about registration opening at six on Sunday 17 May, a shop finder, a registration form, a downloadable manual explaining how to scan, an FAQ, a copyright notice reading 2563 in the Buddhist calendar, and a hotline number. Two years of national infrastructure and the front page never got a redesign.

~ the promise nobody kept ~

Wikipedia's article carries a flat sentence that most government-app write-ups would soften: many found that these goals had never been implemented throughout the pandemic. People scanned in for two years, and what came back out of the system was never demonstrated.

The criticism while it ran was mostly about what it collected. Poramet Minsiri, who founded the portal Kapook.com, told BBC Thai that Thai Chana had made him realize how light Thai citizens' rights were, and objected specifically to the real-time location capture. The academic Sarueni Achawananthakun questioned the lack of transparency around the data and asked what a for-profit bank was doing in the middle of it. Shortly after launch, Thai iPhone users started getting iMessage spam for online casinos and a lot of them blamed the registry for leaking phone numbers. The digital economy ministry denied it.

~ what happened to the records ~

The Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration was dissolved with effect from 30 September 2022, and on 1 October the disease was reclassified as one under surveillance rather than a dangerous communicable disease. The Department of Disease Control ended Thai Chana on the same date and said every record in the tracing system would be destroyed to information safety standards. The last capture the Internet Archive holds of thaichana.com is a redirect dated 21 September 2022, ten days before the switch-off. The domain answers nothing today.

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