The TraceTogether phone app for contact tracking.
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
Photographer: Lauryn Ishak / Bloomberg
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In early 2020, as the coronavirus started 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, learned that the government was developing an app to detect the virus, so he emailed the responsible minister asking how he could help. He was part of a fellowship of developers and engineers who volunteered their services, ready to find a solution.
“Creating this tool solved the problem, 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 strongly. in transparent technologies. . “We understand all of these things. Let the community help you do the right thing. “
In the beginning, Singapore was considered a model for other countries. Because the government encouraged people to use it TraceTogether app on their smartphones, it published the source code and promised strict limits for data usage. Developers from all over the world came to hone and debug it in real time.
Now the early optimism is fading. Public support then took a hit Authorities announced in January that police had used the app’s data in a murder investigation – just months after the responsible minister swore they would only be used for Covid containment. The government offered a rare apology. But instead of falling back, it plans to formalize the police’s ability to access such data in specific cases, Monday proposed legislation in parliament.
Pillay had cast aside his politics as an opposition member Have Singapore Party join the TraceTogether campaign, but he’s concerned.
“I felt disappointed, ”he told Bloomberg News. “The trust factor that was there was reduced.”
Now Singapore could become a completely different kind of model. After countries from the US to Australia and Israel gather piles of data during the pandemic, largely with public support, they may begin to see uses for that information beyond its original intent.
“Singapore winks and winks at other governments that we have done it and that you can do it too,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia. “A lot of countries see Singapore as a success story, so they think everything Singaporeans do has to be good, and that’s a problem.”
Singapore has tried to explain the changes. The legislation would provide access to criminal records of contacts under seven serious crime categories, 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 means 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 when lives are at stake, it is not reasonable for us to say that certain types of data should be out of the reach of the police.”
He added that TraceTogether data will be automatically deleted after 25 days and the entire program will be terminated once the Covid-19 pandemic is over.
Singapore proposes law to allow tracing of data for serious crimes
A 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 measure the distance between users so that the government can notify them if they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus.
Initial adoption by the general public has been slow, with downloads of the app hovering around 20%. The slow pace paralleled a general caution sweeping through the region, reinforced by data security breaches that governments in other countries found difficult to address.
In South Korea, private sector contact tracing apps became increasingly invasive – one provided the exact location of any place of business or residence visited by a positive cause – and government employees can view and peruse hundreds of hours of surveillance camera footage cell phone and credit card transactions to track people.
In China, one digital website reported last December that hackers were able to break through Beijing’s health code system and access and sell government ID numbers online; such ID numbers are used to access an individual’s Covid-19 test records.
There has been pushback from the public. In Thailand, the The government was forced to reverse a threat from the government pandemic center spokesman, which turned out to have tested positive without downloading the virus detection app, which would face jail time.
A medical worker takes a nasal swab from a migrant worker from Myanmar at a test site near Bangkok on Jan. 10.
Photographer: Lillian Suwanrumpha / AFP / Getty Images
In Malaysia, the Ministry of Health Authorized companies destroy the personal data of visitors to their premises within six months after the government investigation has ended.
In Israel, the Supreme Court forbade the country’s intelligence agency to use technology to track down Covid-19 cases.
In Australia, Federal law has been passed to prevent data collected in the country’s Covid app from being used for any purpose other than tracking contacts.
Apple, Google bring Covid-19 contact tracking to 3 billion people
The World Health Organization has issued guidelines for governments on “ethical” considerations in the use of tracking technologies for contact tracing. 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 the concerns of the communities and do not impose an unnecessary burden, for example breaches of the virus. privacy ”, the May 2020 guideline reads.
A big risk with governments looking to expand their use of Covid-19 tracking data is that people will be dissuaded from participating.
“Is this one of the laws with unintended consequences when it slows down usage rates and is worse for society?” said Troy Hunt, an information security expert and creator of the data breach aggregation service, “Have I Been Pwned.”
He points out that governments can present virus technologies as benign and later roll back laws or regulations. The risk of Singapore’s move is that it shows not only governments but also citizens how easily changes can be made.
“There’s a slippery slope, where data retention periods are extended as it adds value to law enforcement, and suddenly the magnitude of the privacy risk is changing so much more,” he said.
Singaporeans are generally optimistic about such measures when it comes to their government, but extraordinarily strong arguments have emerged about the proposed legislation. When a local posted online that he thought concerns were exaggerated and privacy overestimated, he caused a fierce backlash.
“The government is using Covid-19 as an excuse to introduce social engineering and public surveillance platforms and policies that would normally never be considered or publicly palatable,” wrote Andy Wong, a 27-year-old freelance writer and risk analyst. “I wonder how many healthy foreigners want to work in such a country.”
He wrote that Singapore, with its high quality of life and tough government, is sometimes described as Disneyland with the death penalty, but he fears 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 attorney in Singapore, said the data the police were able to extract from the contact tracking app for their investigations has limited value. A person’s interaction history provided circumstantial evidence at best, he said.
So the data is really of limited use. I’m just amazed why the police will go to all that trouble to collect data, when it only shows who that person has been with for the past few weeks, ”he said.
“A lot of people have written and said that they might just turn it on when they need to go out, instead of having it on all the time. That won’t help the national effort to control the virus, ”he added.
As for Pillay, he spent his compulsory military service as a police officer, so he understands the context of using the data in rare and exceptional cases. But the police have lots of other ways to get data for their studies, including camera images and mobile phone tower records.
“It’s not ideal to have specific instances where the TraceTogether data can be accessed,” he said. “This is going to be a tarnished gold standard.”
– With the assistance of Yoolim Lee, Philip Heijmans and Joyce Koh
(Updates with the introduction of the legislation in the fifth paragraph)