If the amount of guided tour groups is any indication, tourists do love being treated like cattle. In fact, they pay a lot of money for the privilege. Anyway Venice isn't really a city any more so much as it is an amusement park for wealthy tourists, so it's not too surprising that they're running their city like a business.

I went in 2018 and spoke with some of the employees working there. It’s very true. Almost no one lives in the city proper anymore; everyone commutes from outside.

On a related note if you decide to go: the city proper is very much a tourist trap. The food is not good and everything is overpriced. If you decide to go I wouldn’t spend more than a day inside the city itself. I had a much better experience taking the water taxi to the surrounding islands. The food is better, people are nicer, it’s way less crowded and the sights are just as good.

Now around 50,000 people live in Venice. It not so empty. In Rome, Florence it is the same a lot of people have moved in the suburbs. Mestre, the city near Venice, has 88,552 resident. I lived in Venice for about 30 years.

Venice's problem is that it has too many tourists, so them not loving it would be a plus in this scenario.

They've been using wifi/cellphone data to track tourists' flow for at least a couple of years.

What seems new is the control tower thingie (Orwellian af) and the tracking of the tourists' origin.

I somehow doubt that they do all of that without ever storing sensitive data/personal identifiers. Anyhow, I suspect some italian journalist is gonna send some FOIAs soon (:

Did you read the article? It’s anonymous data about where tourists are in the city that only checks their cell phone’s country of origin. They are using it to manage crowds, not monitor individuals.

> It seems COVID is the great excuse to let all the Orwellian bs loose.

Any new excuse is good to tighten up the grip.