Singapore police may access Covid-19 contact tracing data for other purposes

mothership.sg

9 points·logicchains··5 comments

Remember that Singapore is a flawed democracy - even though it rates highly on rule of law and government effectiveness, it's somewhat of an outlier in this regard amongst the authoritarian states.

But it's not really surprising that an authoritarian regime would use Covid-19 contact tracing data for other purposes, that was fully expected.

-This isn't just a treat of a flawed democracy (which Singapore undoubtedly is!) - we've been having the same debate in Norway (though not explicitly about Covid-19) for at least a couple of decades - basically, whenever data is collected, some enterprising soul will find another use for the same dataset which was not originally intended, nor consented to by the people supplying the data.

The fronts are quite predictable - one camp suggests that if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear and won't somebody think of the children.

The other suggest that expanding the scope of utilization is both outright wrong and, all other concerns aside, will make it a lot harder to collect (consensual) data in the future.

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25628558 with more discussion over there, albeit different news article.

I think that will conclude contact tracing completely. Governments cannot enforce usage anyway and I think the solution was insufficient to begin with.

is the tracing so scary that no one dared to comment? :-P

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