Broken promises: How Singapore lost trust on contact tracing privacy

Singapore is a much celebrated as an advanced city state, even as a window into the future! However, there are also unmistakable signs of Big Government at work! Let's find out how the people of Singapore will deal with the issues of Leviathan and betrayal by Big Government.

"For Singaporeans, the covid-19 pandemic has been closely intertwined with technology: two technologies, to be specific. The first is the QR code, whose little black-and-white squares have been ubiquitous all over the country as part of the SafeEntry contact tracing system rolled out in April and May.  ...

There’s also TraceTogether, an app that launched in March 2020. It uses Bluetooth to ping close contacts; if two users are in proximity, their devices trade anonymized and encrypted user IDs that can be decrypted by the Ministry of Health should one person test positive for covid-19. ... Private data being used by police

Earlier this month, it emerged that the government’s claim was false. The Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed that data could actually be accessed by the police for criminal investigations; the day after this admission, a minister revealed that such data had, in fact, already been used in a murder investigation. ...

These revelations triggered public anger and criticism, not necessarily because Singaporeans are particularly privacy conscious—in fact, state surveillance is largely normalized in the country—but because people felt they’d been subjected to a bait-and-switch. ..."

Broken promises: How Singapore lost trust on contact tracing privacy | MIT  Technology Review Guarantees that Singaporean phone data would only be used to fight covid-19 were hollow. The implications could stretch beyond the country’s borders.