The TraceTogether contact tracking app.
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
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In early 2020, when the coronavirus began to ricochet worldwide with frightening consequences, Harish Pillay decided to do everything in his power to stop the spread.
The software engineer, who lives in Singapore, heard that the government was designing an app to detect the virus, and he sent the driver an email asking how he could help. He was part of a community of developers and engineers who volunteered their services, ready to find a solution.
“The problem was solved by creating this tool, but there were aspects of trust and confidentiality that also needed to be addressed,” said Pillay, who has spent much of his career working on Red Hat’s open-source software and believes in transparent technologies. . “We understand all these things. Let the community help you do the right thing. ”
In the beginning, Singapore was held up as a model for other countries. As the government has encouraged people to TraceTogether app on their smartphones, has published the source code and promised strict restrictions on the use of data. Developers from around the world have taken the time to grind and debug it in real time.
Now the early optimism is fading. Public support then suffered a blow authorities announced in January that police had used the app’s information in a murder investigation – just months after the minister in charge promised it would only be used for Covid’s restraint. The government has made a rare apology. But rather than returning, it plans to formalize the ability of the police to access such information in specific cases, to introduce the proposed legislation in parliament on Monday.
Pillay set aside his politics as a member of the opposition Progress Singapore Party will be part of the TraceTogether campaign, but he is concerned.
‘I feeling disappointed, ”he told Bloomberg News. “The confidence factor that was there was reduced.”
Now Singapore can become a very different kind of model. After countries from the US to Australia and Israel collected large amounts of data during the pandemic, mainly with public support, they may begin to see the use of the information beyond its original intent.
“Singapore says with a wink and a nod to other governments that we have done this and that you can do it too,” said Phil Robertson, Deputy Director at Human Rights Watch. “Many countries see Singapore as a success story, so they think everything Singaporeans do should be good, and that’s a problem.”
Singapore tried to explain the changes. The legislation provides access to contact tracing data under seven categories of serious crimes, including murder, rape and drug trafficking. In response to inquiries, a government spokesman referred to the comments of Minister Vivian Balakrishnan in January.
“The police must be given the tools to bring criminals to justice and protect the safety and security of all Singaporeans,” he said at the time. “Especially in very serious cases, and where lives are at stake, it is not fair for us to say that certain classes of data should be beyond the reach of the police.”
He added that TraceTogether data will be automatically purified after 25 days and that the entire program will be terminated once the Covid-19 pandemic is over.
Singapore proposes legislation to track data for serious crimes
A government minister said in January that TraceTogether is used by about 78% of Singapore’s residents, or about 4.2 million people. A smartphone app and token use Bluetooth technology to determine the distance between users so the government can notify them if they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus.
The initial acceptance from the general public was slow, and downloads of the app turned around 20%. The slow pace coincides with a general vigilance flowing through the region, amplified by breaches in data security that governments in other countries are struggling to address.
In South Korea, private-sector contact tracking apps have become increasingly intrusive – one provided the position of every business or home is a positive one – and government workers can review hundreds of hours of surveillance camera footage cell phone and credit card transactions to track people.
In China, a a digital website reported last December that hackers were able to breach Beijing’s health code system and gain access to government ID numbers and sell them online; such ID numbers are used to gain access to a person’s Covid-19 test records.
There is backlash from the public. In Thailand, the The government was forced to return a threat from the government’s pandemic center’s spokesman that anyone who tested positive without downloading the virus detection app would be jailed.
A medical worker takes a nose swab from a migrant worker in Myanmar at a test site near Bangkok on January 10.
Photographer: Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty Images
In Malaysia, the Ministry of Health mandatory businesses destroy the personal records of visitors to their premises within six months after the government search is terminated.
In Israel, the Supreme Court the country’s intelligence agency bans using technology to track down Covid-19 cases.
In Australia, federal legislation has been enacted to prevent data collected in the country’s Covid app from being used outside of contact detection for any purpose.
Apple, Google Brings Covid-19 contact tracking to 3 billion people
The World Health Organization has issued guidelines to governments on the “ethical” considerations of using contact detection technologies. Member States are required to develop surveillance systems to record “critical data” to monitor the virus, “while ensuring that such systems are transparent, respond to community concerns, and do not impose unnecessary burdens, such as privacy breaches. , “the guidance issued in May 2020 reads.
One major risk for governments seeking to expand their use of Covid-19 tracking data is that people are being prevented from participating.
“Is it one of the laws of unintended consequences, if it lowers the usage tariff and is worse for society?” says Troy Hunt, an information security expert and creator of the data breach collection service, “Am I pinned.”
He points out that governments can propose virus technologies as benevolent and then later reverse legislation or regulations. The risk of Singapore’s move is that it shows not only governments but also citizens how easily change can be made.
“There’s a slippery slope where data retention periods get longer because it adds value to law enforcement, and suddenly the scope of the privacy risk changes so much more,” he said.
Singaporeans tend to be lenient about such steps as far as their government is concerned, but extraordinarily powerful arguments have erupted over the proposed legislation. When a local posted online that he thinks concern is overwhelming and privacy is overrated, he has caused a severe setback.
“The government is using Covid-19 as an excuse to set up social engineering and public oversight platforms and policies that would normally never be considered as tasteless,” he said. wrote Andy Wong, a 27-year-old freelance defense writer and risk analyst. “I wonder how many sensible foreigners would want to work in such a country.”
He wrote that Singapore, with its high quality of life and difficult government, is sometimes described as Disneyland with the death penalty, but he is worried that it will become ‘North Korea with a smile’.
“The episode is a huge betrayal of trust for ordinary citizens like me,” he told Bloomberg News.
Jonathan Kok, an intellectual property lawyer in Singapore, said there was limited value in the data that police could obtain from the contact tracing program for their investigations. A person’s interaction history yields on its best circumstantial evidence, he said.
‘The use of the data is therefore very limited. “I’m just amazed at why the police want to make all the effort to collect data if it shows you who the person was with in the past few weeks,” he said.
‘A lot of people have signed up and said they can only turn on the device if they have to go out instead of running it all the time. It does not help the national effort to limit the virus, “he added.
As for Pillay, he has spent his compulsory national service as a police officer, so he understands the context of using the data in rare and exceptional cases. But the police have many other ways to gather data for their investigations, including CCTV recordings and walkie-talkie tower records.
“It’s less than ideal to have specific cases where the TraceTogether data can be accessed,” he said. “It will be a polluted gold standard.”
– With the help of Yoolim Lee, Philip Heijmans and Joyce Koh
(Updates with the introduction of legislation in the fifth paragraph)