TraceTogether phone tracking application.
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
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In early 2020, as the coronavirus began to bounce 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, found out that the government is designing an application to track the virus, so he sent an e-mail to the responsible minister and asked him how he could help. He was part of a scholarship for developers and engineers who volunteered their services, ready to present a solution.
“The issue was resolved by creating this tool, but there were issues of trust and confidentiality that also needed to be addressed,” said Pillay, who has worked at Red Hat open source software for much of his career. fervor in transparent technologies. . “It simply came to our notice then. Let the community help you do the right thing. ”
In the beginning, Singapore was supported as a model for other nations. While the government encouraged people to unload The TraceTogether application on their smartphones, published the source code and promised strict limits on the use of data. Developers around the world participated in its development and debugging in real time.
Now, the early optimism is fading. Public support took a hit after authorities revealed in January that police had used the application’s data in a murder investigation – just months after the responsible minister swore it would only be used to isolate Covid. The government issued a rare apology. But rather than backtracking, intends to formalize the police’s ability to access such data in specific cases, introducing the proposed legislation in 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 become concerned.
“I 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 US countries as far as Australia and Israel collected piles of data during the pandemic, largely with public support, they could begin to see uses for this information beyond the original intention.
“Singapore is telling other governments, winking, that we have done it and that you can do it,” said Phil Robertson, Asia’s deputy director for Human Rights Watch. “Many countries see Singapore as a success story, so I think whatever Singaporeans do has to be good, and that’s a problem.”
Singapore tried to explain the changes. The legislation would allow access to contact tracking data in seven categories of serious crime, 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 necessary tools to bring criminals to justice and to 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 unreasonable to say that certain classes of data should not be available to the police.”
He added that TraceTogether data is automatically cleared after 25 days and that the entire program will be withdrawn once the Covid-19 pandemic is completed.
Singapore proposes a law to allow the tracking of data for serious crimes
A government minister said in January that TraceTogether is used by about 78% of Singapore residents, or about 4.2 million people. A smartphone app and 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 by the general public was slow, with downloads of the application standing at about 20%. The slow pace was paralleled by a general precaution circulating in the region, amplified by data security breaches that governments in other countries have struggled to resolve.
In South Korea, private sector contact tracking applications have become increasingly invasive – one provided the exact location of every business or home visited by a positive case – and government workers are able to review hundreds of hours. of surveillance camera recordings and go through mobile phone and credit card transactions to track people.
In China, a the digital site reported in December last year that hackers had managed to breach Beijing’s health code system and access government ID numbers and sell them online; such identification numbers are used to access a person’s Covid-19 test records.
There was a push from the public. In Thailand, The government has been forced to withdraw a threat from a spokesperson for the government’s pandemic center that anyone who tested positive without downloading the virus should be shut down.
A medical worker takes a nose pad 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 the mandated companies destroy the personal records of the visitors at their headquarters within six months from the end of the pursuit ordered by the government.
In Israel, the Supreme Court banned the country’s intelligence agency from using the technology to track Covid-19 cases.
In Australia, federal legislation has been enacted to prevent the use of data collected in the country’s Covid application for any purpose other than tracking contacts.
Apple, Google bring Covid-19 Contact-Tracing to 3 billion people
The World Health Organization has issued guidance to governments on the “ethical” considerations of using tracking technologies to track contacts. Member States are required to develop surveillance systems to capture “critical data” to monitor the virus, “while ensuring that such systems are transparent, responsive to community concerns and do not impose unnecessary burdens, such as breaches of life.” private ”. is headed in May 2020.
A major risk for governments wishing to expand their use of Covid-19 tracking data is that people will be discouraged from participating.
“Is it one of the laws of unintended consequences that reduces the utilization rate and is more serious for society?” said Troy Hunt, an information security expert and creator data breach aggregation service, “I was harmed”.
He points out that governments may present antivirus technologies as benign and then reverse legislation or regulations later. The risk of the Singapore movement is that it shows not only governments but also citizens how easily change can be made.
“There is a slippery slope, in which data retention periods are increased because it adds value to law enforcement and suddenly the purpose of the privacy risk changes much more,” he said.
Singaporeans tend to be sympathetic to such moves when it comes to their government, but unusually strong arguments have emerged about the proposed legislation. When a local posted online, considering that worries were overloaded and privacy overrated, triggered a fierce comeback.
“The government is using Covid-19 as an excuse to implement social engineering and public oversight platforms and policies that would normally never have been considered or publicly accepted.” wrote Andy Wong, a 27-year-old freelance defense writer and risk analyst. “I wonder how many healthy foreigners will want to work in a country like this.”
He wrote that Singapore, with a high quality of life and a harsh government, is sometimes described as Disneyland with the death penalty, but worries 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, an intellectual property lawyer in Singapore, said there was limited value to the data police could get from the contact tracking app for their investigations. The history of a person’s interactions provided circumstantial evidence at best, he said.
“So the data has a very limited use. I’m just surprised why the police want to get over all these problems to collect data when they only show you who that person has been with in the last few weeks, “he said.
“Many people have written and said that they could turn on the device when they need to go out instead of running it all the time. This will not help the national effort to contain the virus, “he added.
As for Pillay, he has done his mandatory national service as a police officer, so he understands the context of using the data in rare and exceptional cases. But the police did Lots of other ways to get data for their investigations, including CCTV and footage mobile phone tower records.
“It’s less than ideal to have specific instances where TraceTogether data can be accessed,” he said. “This will be a stained gold standard.”
– With the assistance of Yoolim Lee, Philip Heijmans and Joyce Koh
(Updates with the introduction of the legislation in the fifth paragraph)