The TraceTogether phone contact tracking app.
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
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In early 2020, when the coronavirus began bowing around the world with terrifying consequences, Harish Pillay decided to do everything he could to help stop the spread.
The software engineer, who lives in Singapore, heard that the government was designing an application to track the virus, so he sent an email to the responsible minister and asked him how he could help him. He was part of a scholarship for developers and engineers who volunteered their services, willing to present a solution.
“The problem was being solved by creating this tool, but there were aspects of trust and confidentiality that also needed to be addressed,” said Pillay, who has worked on Red Hat’s open source software much of his career and believes fervently. in transparent technologies. . “We understand all these things. Let the community help you do the right thing. “
At first, Singapore remained a model for other nations. How the government encouraged people to download the file With the TraceTogether app on his smartphones, he released the source code and promised strict limits on data usage. Developers around the world came forward to perfect it and debug it in real time.
Now the initial optimism is fading. Public support was successful afterwards authorities revealed in January that police had used the application data in a murder investigation, just months after the responsible minister promised it would only be used to contain Covid. The government issued a rare apology. But instead of backing down, it plans to formalize the ability of the police to access this data in specific cases, presenting the legislative proposal to parliament on Monday.
Pillay had set aside his politics as a member of the opposition Progress Singapore Party will be part of the TraceTogether campaign, but has been concerned.
“Jo felt disappointed, “he told Bloomberg News.” The confidence factor that was there was reduced. “
Now Singapore could become a very different type of model. After countries from the United States to Australia and Israel collected data series during the pandemic, largely with public support, they may begin to see uses of this information beyond the original intention.
“Singapore is telling other governments, with a wink and a nod, that we’ve done it and that you can do it too,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director in Asia for Human Rights Watch. “A lot of countries see Singapore as a success story, so they think what Singaporeans do should be good, and that’s a problem.”
Singapore has tried to explain the changes. The legislation would allow access to contact tracking data in seven categories of serious crimes, including murder, rape and drug trafficking. In response to questions, a government spokesman referred to Minister Vivian Balakrishnan’s comments in January.
“The police must be given the tools to bring criminals to justice and protect the safety of all Singaporeans,” he said at the time. “Especially in very serious cases and where there are lives at stake, it is unreasonable to say that certain kinds of data should be out of the reach of the police.”
He he added that TraceTogether data will be automatically deleted after 25 days and that the entire program will be removed once the Covid-19 pandemic ends.
Singapore proposes a law to allow data tracking for serious crimes
A government minister said that in January TraceTogether is used by approximately 78% of Singapore residents, or approximately 4.2 million people. A smartphone app and a token use Bluetooth technology to measure the distance between users, allowing the government to notify them if they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus.
Initial acceptance from the general public was slow, with app downloads hovering around 20%. The slow pace was parallel to a general precaution running through the region, amplified by data security breaches that governments in other countries struggled to address.
In South Korea, private sector contact tracking applications have become increasingly invasive (one provided the exact location of each business site or home visited by a positive case) and government workers can review hundreds of hours of surveillance camera material and pass cell phone and credit card transactions to locate people.
In China, a the digital website reported last December that hackers were able to breach Beijing’s health code system and access government identification numbers and sell them online; these identification numbers are used to access a person’s Covid-19 test records.
There has been a backlash from the public. In Thailand, the the government was forced to withdraw from a threat from the spokesperson for the government pandemic center, according to which anyone who tested positive without downloading the virus monitoring app would go to jail.
A medical worker took a swab in the nose of a Myanmar migrant worker at a test site near Bangkok on January 10th.
Photographer: Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty Images
In Malaysia, the Ministry of Health forced companies destroy visitors ’personal records at their facilities within six months of the completion of government-ordered tracking.
In Israel, the Supreme Court banned the country’s intelligence agency from using technology to track Covid-19 cases.
In Australia, federal legislation was passed to prevent data collected in the country’s Covid app from being used for any purpose beyond contact tracking.
Apple and Google bring Covid-19 contacts tracking to 3 billion people
He It has been published by the World Health Organization guidelines to governments on “ethical” considerations of the use of tracking technologies for contact tracking. Member States are required to develop surveillance systems to capture “critical data” to control the virus, “while ensuring that these systems are transparent, responsive to community concerns and do not impose unnecessary burdens, for example, on privacy “. it is called the guide issued in May 2020.
One of the main risks for governments wanting to expand their use of Covid-19 monitoring data is that people will be discouraged from participating.
“Is this one of the unintended consequences laws where it reduces the rate of use and is worse for society?” said Troy Hunt, an information security expert and the creator of the data breach aggregation service, “I have been uploaded”?
He points out that governments may present antivirus technologies as benign and subsequently reverse legislation or regulations. The risk of Singapore’s decision is that it shows not only governments but also citizens, the ease with which changes can be made.
“There is a slippery slope, where data retention periods increase because they add value to law enforcement and suddenly the scope of the privacy risk changes a lot more,” he said.
Singaporeans tend to be bloody about these moves when it comes to their government, but unusually strong arguments have emerged about the proposed legislation. When a local published online believing that concerns were excessive and privacy overrated, provoked a fierce rebound.
“The government uses Covid-19 as an excuse to implement social engineering and public surveillance platforms and policies that would not normally have been considered or publicly liked,” wrote Andy Wong, a 27-year-old freelance defense writer and risk analyst. “I wonder how many sensible foreigners will want to work in a country like this.”
He wrote that Singapore, with its high quality of life and tough government, is sometimes described as Disneyland with the death penalty, but is concerned that it will become “North Korea with a smile”.
The episode is “a massive betrayal of trust for ordinary citizens like me,” he told Bloomberg News.
Jonathan Kok, a Singapore intellectual property lawyer, said the data police could obtain from the contact tracking app for his investigations was limited. A person’s best history of interactions provided circumstantial evidence at best, he said.
“Therefore, the data has a really limited use. I’m surprised why the police want to go through all these problems to collect data when they only show you who that person was with for the last few weeks or so, ”he said.
“A lot of people have written there and said they might turn on the device when it needs to come out instead of running it all the time. That won’t help the national effort to contain the virus,” he added.
As for Pillay, he spent his mandatory national service as a police officer, so he understands the context of the use of data in rare and exceptional cases. But the police do many other ways to obtain data for your research, including CCTV images and Phone tower records.
“It’s less than ideal to have specific cases where TraceTogether data can be accessed,” he said. “This will be a golden standard.”
– With the assistance of Yoolim Lee, Philip Heijmans and Joyce Koh
(Updates with the introduction of the legislation in the fifth paragraph)