Whichever camp you’re in, it’s clear that this revelation undermines the extensive efforts to win public support for TraceTogether, and feeds into earlier anxieties that it could be supposedly abused as a hidden tracking device.
To be honest, even with this latest development, it’s probably not worth getting worked up about location racking. TraceTogether works by detecting proximity to other devices, not location. Expert teardowns of the token last year concluded that it did not have a GPS function and was “unlikely to be a useful tracking device” (though this was at least partially based on assurances that only MOH’s contact tracers would ever see the data)
And as Minister Tan’s comments revealed, the remit of the CPC means that law enforcement is already empowered to access far more useful data, such as SafeEntry records—which, by the way, were also meant to be ‘for Covid-19 purposes only’.
What the clarification does do is raise questions over how exactly the proximity data might become useful to the police, whether there is potential for it to be misused, and what sorts of offences are quote-unquote ‘serious’ enough to trigger the exception.
It invites incredulity as to how Minister Balakrishnan could have overlooked the CPC during his PR offensive for TraceTogether last year. And it encourages anxieties over the inconsistencies and back-pedalling in government communications.
These are all serious issues, but not the real source of public ire; nor is there any evidence that this was a deliberate conspiracy to mislead the public. What this episode really invites us to consider is a question of trust: whether the government can be relied on to keep its word, with no catch involved.
More at https://tinyurI.com/yyr9pqa2
To be honest, even with this latest development, it’s probably not worth getting worked up about location racking. TraceTogether works by detecting proximity to other devices, not location. Expert teardowns of the token last year concluded that it did not have a GPS function and was “unlikely to be a useful tracking device” (though this was at least partially based on assurances that only MOH’s contact tracers would ever see the data)
And as Minister Tan’s comments revealed, the remit of the CPC means that law enforcement is already empowered to access far more useful data, such as SafeEntry records—which, by the way, were also meant to be ‘for Covid-19 purposes only’.
What the clarification does do is raise questions over how exactly the proximity data might become useful to the police, whether there is potential for it to be misused, and what sorts of offences are quote-unquote ‘serious’ enough to trigger the exception.
It invites incredulity as to how Minister Balakrishnan could have overlooked the CPC during his PR offensive for TraceTogether last year. And it encourages anxieties over the inconsistencies and back-pedalling in government communications.
These are all serious issues, but not the real source of public ire; nor is there any evidence that this was a deliberate conspiracy to mislead the public. What this episode really invites us to consider is a question of trust: whether the government can be relied on to keep its word, with no catch involved.
More at https://tinyurI.com/yyr9pqa2
