Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations | Hacker News Reader

Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

channelnewsasia.com

146 pointsacekingspade137 comments

One thing that drives me crazy about this is that Apple and Google partnered to come up with a brilliant Bluetooth solution to contact tracing right at the beginning of the pandemic.

It was privacy first, well designed, and it works.

It was hamstrung by being opt-in instead of opt-out, relying on state level cooperation and misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN).

As a result you now see dumber, less effective, less privacy conscious contact tracing in effect or governments relying on data brokers (all the other apps that collect and resell your data to third parties and are not opt-out).

It’s a shame.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-part...

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

Google and Apple will happily deliver all your information to the government when it becomes their legal obligation.

Are we so naive to believe that if only we adopted their “privacy conscious” solution, there won’t be less privacy focused solutions preferred by the government? Or that their solution won’t be forced to change to meet their legal requirements?

> “ misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN).”

Your comment is case-in-point the kind of knee-jerk response that I was talking about.

Edit: You added the second part after I’d already responded. They developed a good model to do large scale contact tracing in a privacy conscious way. People rejected this with vague suggestions like your comment about how it could be changed to be the opposite of what they’ve developed. Most people didn’t understand how it worked at all or why the design was good.

As a result, worse less-privacy preserving methods are used.

If they can be forced to change whatever implementation they have by the government then it helps no one. It’s just giving them more information on top of all their existing data they already have on you.

> “ If they can be forced to change whatever implementation they have by the government then it helps no one.”

They can’t be easily forced to change the implementation and their implementation reduces the risk of privacy problems. It’s designed explicitly to be effective without increasing that risk and without giving the government any individual’s information.

It’s worth reading the doc I linked.

And it’s a solution looking for a problem. No one wanted this. Not the people and not the government.

It doesn’t solve my problem because I will not use such an app, period.

It doesn’t solve the government’s objective of maximum data collection so they won’t use it.

The very idea of privacy conscious contact tracing is an oxymoron.

> “ It doesn’t solve my problem because I will not use such an app, period.”

This is why I’d argue it should have been an OS update and you can’t opt-out (or at least default opt-in).

If you throw your phone in the trash so be it, everyone else will get privacy preserving exposure notifications. Paired with effective quarantine this may have stopped the spread and thousands of people who died might have lived.

You may want to throw your phone in the trash anyway since it gives away your location to the telecoms.

Perhaps it would have given the Librem 5 and the PinePhone an unexpected fanbase, from all of those who refuse the forced update.

You underestimate how important it is to (most, competent) governments to keep their citizens alive and how unprepared they were caught in this. This solution (if used) was better than flying blind and cost these governments nothing. It's not fair to pretend a government would not welcome contact tracing as-is if it helped provide a tool to stop the spread. Not everything a government does is out to surveil you, they have to still provide some other functions.

After a lid is on things though - yeah, maybe. Maybe they'll try to flip this, but not while their pants are down.

Then why wasn’t it used? Surely all these governments all have heard of apple/google’s superior solution. Reality undermines this argument.

some waited, some didn't. I can't pretend to know why.

My personal guess/opinion is that those governments who's only objective was to get people isolated on exposure would at least have leaned towards the apple/google solution when it became available. Those who had ulterior motives (or had already rolled something out) would be less likely to wait for it.

One surprise for me here is Norway's initial implementation, which it later re-evaluated[1], you'll also see (at least at that point in time) that Bahrain and Kuwait did not. Bahrain even turned it in to a game show.

Edit: just to add, you'd see for example a place like Australia looking in to the solution once available, last paragraph here[2] - my opinion is that these countries do not feel threatened by their general populace, thus don't feel the need to turn everything in to a mass surveillance tool if they don't need to

[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/bahrain-kuwai...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-apps-t...

I personally refuse to use any contact tracing because an envitible consequence of its adoption is the idea that mass surveillance is legitimate so long as it can be argued it's keeping people safe.

Tech like this is always abused by governments. Just look at how governments are attacking encrypted messaging services today. It would be naive to think same thing wouldn't happen for any popular privacy-first contact tracing app.

Your comment is another example of dismissing what they did without understanding it.

As a result of this we now have less effective, higher privacy risk implementations in place.

We’re trying to tell you that this would have happened anyway and contact tracing itself is just another instrument in the surveillance state.

And I’m trying to tell you that this overly simplistic response ignores pragmatic real-world solutions that let people accomplish hard things even with multiple constraints.

It is in fact possible to have effective and privacy preserving contact tracing at scale.

It looks like you’re saying that apple’s and google’s solution can’t be used for privacy abuse.

Could it facilitate implementing one? E.g. could a country push for changes to how the solution works within a given location?

Phones track location so yeah a government could always try to force companies to hand over location data, but that issue is orthogonal to this solution.

Their Bluetooth implementation makes it harder for governments to request more problematic location data, because a solution exists that doesn’t require this kind of data.

The existence of this solution reduces privacy abuse risk.

Sad reality: Countries can always push, say, for mandatory upload of all cryptographic keys to government servers. We have to trust in megacorp lawyers to protect us from that at least to the point of exposing that come election times.

And the alternative of not using them.

I wasn't fundamentally opposed, but as discussion went the way to maybe mandate usage, I thought it more prudent to abstain.

While technically there is nothing wrong with the implementation of Google or Apple, if they behave as specfified, I will not share any medical info with my smartphone as long as we do not have open systems in place.

The problem is understood and not accepted. These cases of third party ambition are a plain confirmation about the doubts many people had. You can ignore it but some people might not want to follow.

I have access to COVID tests through doctors in my family. I believe such tests would serve us better than these wellness apps. Scaling up the production would be possible within the budget that was used for tracing apps.

You can’t easily not use a lot of the data broker stuff that random apps use to resell your data. The data is sold without you noticing.

Maybe you’re cautious, but check the location services for apps on your phone - random third party apps may be selling it to brokers that then resell it to others. Even innocuous apps like free weather apps will do this sort of thing. [0]

Thankfully Apple’s OS updates are making this harder, but that’s relatively new.

The Bluetooth implementation doesn’t require you to input any medical data.

I agree that ubiquitous, free testing would have also helped. I think very high quality exposure notifications paired with quarantine would have been very effective too.

[0]: https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/01/05/weather-apps-are-secr... (there was a better article on HN more recently, but I can’t remember the title).

To me, anyone who work in tech and dismisses the Exposure Notification framework as "surveillance" is no different from an anti-vaxxer.

The app does 3 things on your phone: 1) continuously exchange Temporary Exposure Keys with other phones with EN enabled, and 2) periodically download a list of TEKs, compare to locally cached list of TEKs to determine if you were in close contact with a COVID positive patient, and 3) in the unlikely event when you are tested positive, work with your Health Authority, use a one-time code to upload your TEKs to the key server.

If you are really paranoid, you can do 1 and 2 with just a battery powered Raspberry Pi Zero (someone has done that and was previously posted to HN but can't find it right now) which should be net beneficial to you. But if you just don't understand this framework please stop spreading FUD.

I agree. I'm visiting Thailand and the locally developed app requires high precision location permissions, the app is constantly running, and the data is all tied to my passport number. It destroys my battery, and it's a complete privacy invasion.

We had a lot of other existing technology, like simple face masks, that could have been deployed against the spread of the pandemic as well.

It is almost a case study on how you can't solve problems that are fundamentally social ones by throwing technology (old or new) at the problem.

You're absolutely right that it's a shame.

Yes - I agree, we need both.

Sane policy and competent people to prioritize policy in order to lead effectively and move what needs to happen forward (massive categorical failure in the US on this bit, both in government and initial media response to the virus).

We also need the technical solution to consider privacy risk in the initial design so that we don’t implement something that can be abused later for other purposes.

This second part we have and it’s a great solution, but without the policy/leadership piece we can’t leverage it.

Exposure notification is not contact tracing. Questionable if effective contact tracing on mass scale without privacy violation is possible. At least Singapore contact trace and enforcement chain worked. Worse, A&G hubris in their solution and lack of cooperation with governments that wanted a proper contact trace solution bordered on insolence has caused preventable deaths. The fact that two platform owners could prevent the rest of the world from mounting proper epidemic responses is terrifying. Even more so if it's just a handful of employees dictating their culture to the rest of the world.

With enough responsible people and critical mass, exposure notification and contact tracing are ideally equivalent at their objective. Unfortunately though, people aren't responsible

It's really optimistic to think mass rollout of Apple/Google protocol wouldn't be abused. Once government makes it compulsory to use such app in some scenarios (and society actually agrees to do that instead of protesting it en masse) it's over. There's nothing fundamentally stopping government from later changing the technical mechanism ("Please install our national app; it's more trustworthy than foreign megacorps"). Good percentage of society is not technical literate enough to differentiate between "brilliant Bluetooth solution" and "dumber contact tracing relying on data brokers"; for many people that's just implementation detail on the same level as new UI.

Apple/Google pushing their specific privacy preserving implementation of exposure notifications out via an OS update is not the same as a government mandating surveillance app installs.

The existence of the first does not lead to the second.

The implementation was only privacy-preserving in an idealistic World in which governments wouldn't mandate uploading of the beacon keys.

It's another example of the persistent, naive belief amongst technologists that clever implementation can trump legislation.

The API/protocol is a good way of implementing the idea in a privacy-friendly way although I think everyone should have been clear that it is not as private as simply disabling Bluetooth or not carrying a phone. It is pretty benign. But being honest about that is important if for no other reason than to build trust.

However, the apps built on top of the API have (at least in some instances) clearly fallen victim of scope creep - eg the UK app came with venue check-in functionality (which then suddenly became legally mandated and there was no separate check-in app so you were out of luck if your phone didn't support the API or you didn't want to enable Bluetooth) and a function which tells you how "risky" your postcode is which you can't switch off. There was even brief talk about it being extended to include "vaccine passport" type functionality.

This was, sadly, predictable, and is why many people simply won't trust it.

The other issue with the app-based approach is that it sadly appears to be pretty useless. At least the UK app appears to notify for far too many contacts, large numbers of which are false alarms of one sort or another (neighbours, people sat in different offices, etc). While using Bluetooth proximity was a good idea, I think it's fair to say at this point that in the real world it just hasn't worked.

I agree with you that relying on state/country cooperation to build the apps was part of the problem.

I don’t agree that it’s useless, 15min of close proximity to a confirmed positive COVID patient within the timeframe is the best possible determination of exposure and people should quarantine if they get it.

I could be persuaded that too many are notified if there’s decent evidence of it, but with the massive case load/spread in the UK right now - I’m more likely to suspect that amount of people exposed is massive.

I'm not sure current case numbers really tell you much either way - you could equally argue that it's evidence that the app didn't work of course.

The issue in particular is that Bluetooth proximity isn't reliably able to distinguish between "next to but with a meaningful barrier in between" and "actually next to".

In my office, for example, we have areas adjacent to one another separated by floor to ceiling glass walls. People working on one side of the wall don't work with people on the other side and are not allowed to access the other area. There are quite a few scenarios like this (apartment blocks with thin partition walls between apartments, sat in a traffic jam next to another car, etc.

Meh. If the Singaporian government thinks the police force should have contact tracing information then the police force shall have it. How v1 of an app was designed doesn't matter. Either Google folds and changes the design to suit or they move to a new app provider.

If it is acceptable to use the data for contract tracing for, what exactly is the argument that the government should be using data for contract tracing but not other law enforcement? I can imagine a few arguments, but they all seem weak. The contract-tracing-by-app can of worms shouldnh't have been opened.

I don’t disagree, Singapore specifically leans a little authoritarian and doesn’t really care about the privacy preservation. I was thinking more for countries that have stronger privacy protections or culture around individual rights.

In those countries a lot of people dismissed the Google/Apple approach without understanding it which lead to a privacy worse approach that’s also less effective.

I don’t disagree with the criticism of it being opt-in but I would go further: Apple and Google took months to roll out their framework, they certainly didn‘t prioritize it enough. They are the only parties in a position to implement digital contact tracing natively and they failed us. With great power comes great responsibility. No start-up or government has the ability to implement a low-level cross-platform contact tracing api. As of Today Apple still has not enabled their framework on iOS <= 12 devices even though there are countless people using devices that can not be updated to the current iOS. They have previously provided critical security updates for out-of-support versions of their OS. Why did they not do the same for the contact tracing framework?

That was expected from the very beginning. Government will collect as much data as possible citing medical reasons and then use the data as it pleases saying since we collect, we are free to use as we want (citing again some blah-blah about public benefits).

What's surprising is that they disclose it. Perhaps he just wasnt prepared for the question

You have some data in the hands of any government, and once you have a judge's approval, the data will be obtained by the authority regardless where you are. It makes sense that the data should be stored on your devices only. If a criminal is caught with his phone, the data can still be obtained by the police (the same as phone records for example), and it can still be useful for criminal investigation, and normal citizen don't have to worry about their data. It is actually achievable with Google and Apple's approach.

And I think it was a genuine answer. This is a reply to MP, not a random reporter on streets.

I believe you're missing the point.

At first, they explain the information is collected solely for medical reasons. Now they say they can use it as they please. Don't you see fallacy here?

I am sure it was a genuine answer - that's why I was surprised. Usually those things are sugar covered.

>At first, they explain the information is collected solely for medical reasons. Now they say they can use it as they please. Don't you see fallacy here?

Technically not a fallacy (as there's no logical fault in what they said). Just falling back on a promise to the public.

It's not a logical fallacy, but it's still a fallacy.

You keep using this word "fallacy". I don't think it means what you think it means [1]

(a) a deceptive, misleading, or false notion, belief, etc.: That the world is flat was at one time a popular fallacy.

(b) a misleading or unsound argument.

(d) Logic. any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render arguments logically unsound.

[1] to paraphrase "The Princess Bride"

This usage fits definitions a, b, and c. This very definition draws a distinction between a 'fallacy' and a 'logical fallacy'

>This usage fits definitions a, b, and c.

No, it doesn't.

Government: - "We will use data just for medical purposes"

Government (later): - "Guess what, we lied/we recant: we will use them for other state purposes too".

There's nothing fallacious in (a), (b) or (c) way about either statement or the whole situation.

It's a brilliant example of doublethink you did there.

Not only that, it's also the counterexample to calling "slippery slope" a fallacy. After all, slippery slope is not a fallacy if the slope is, in fact, slippery.

> Government will collect as much data as possible citing medical reasons and then use the data as it pleases saying since we collect

Some governments... We don't all live in a surveillance state.

While I do agree with the correction - thank you, unfortunately this is applicable to certain extend to any government in developed world. Especially since the whole COVID madness started.

You'd be surprised.

Where do you leave that's not a surveillance state?

Nordic country. And my point was mainly targeted on "will the government use the data for other non-intended purposes". Instead of whether or not my Internet traffic is monitored by some state actor.

>Nordic country

Nine Eyes:

The Nine Eyes is a different arrangement that consists of the same members of Five Eyes working with Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway.

Fourteen Eyes:

According to a document leaked by Edward Snowden, there is another working agreement amongst 14 nations officially known as SIGINT Seniors Europe, or "SSEUR". These "14 Eyes" consist of the same members of Nine Eyes plus Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.

>will the government use the data for other non-intended purposes

I wouldn't bet on it. I think that nordic cultures (especially Sweden) have the tendency to think the government does no wrong, has no power plays and special interests, and only ever does what it says it does.

I'd be happy to learn which governments in your opinion wouldn't abuse such power.

Europe ( perhaps excluding Hungary). Even then, the bluetooth based protocol of Apple and Google can't be used for location tracing.

The governments have 0 location data in possession when based on that protocol.

I don't think the location aspect is what is important to the government, rather it's the "who met who, and when" aspect.

Which is exactly why the protocol is:

1. Your phone transmits a temporary random number. 2. Your phone stores, but never uploads, list of all the numbers it has seen for a prolonged period. 3. Your phone downloads daily a list of published numbers and cross-references that with the local list.

Literally the only time you upload anything is when you report being positive.

It's funny you say that given I live in an EU country (which is not Hungary) and I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

Like I said, if the app is based on the protocol so it's not even possible in that case.

Most countries followed this spec and combatting the virus has more priority in every country in the EU. Not at all handling out fines.

Although France is not implementing the standard protocol. They are very protective of citizens data ( not even a city can access it).

( Source: my work is related to this in Belgium and France)

Everything is permitted...

Without a system that gives strong enough negative feedbacks to this kind of "usage", they will never go away.

Lack of negative feedback can be seen as a kind of positive feedback too.

Singapore is anyway a totalitarian state, Lee Kuan Yew was basically a "benevolent" dictator, if there is such a thing.

true, but he did "create" an extraordinary city state.

If it wasn't convenient for many players (from western to asian neighbors) to have a neutral tax-haven state in the area, it would have ended up like any small Asian/African/Latin American state.

I think of it as the Switzerland of Asia.

Switzerland of Asia would probably be the GCC countries: the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. Singapore is more like Luxembourg/Monaco of Asia.

I always recall William Gibson's description of the city-state as 'Disneyland with the Death Penalty'.

The accompanying 1993 article for those who haven't seen it previously: https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

It wouldn't be a post about Singapore without someone bringing up the 27 year old article

The country is designed for elites, and it's not shy about it.

Singapore has democratic pressure points than it looks, and that's largely the reason why LKY acted "benevolently" where he did. He was essentially forced to. He was still a thug.

Firstly the fact that the leaders and all the population are squashed up against one another exerts a massive influence on the government. They're much more vulnerable to protest than other governments because they can't hide as easily. This makes them much more nervous and more willing to placate the populace than the government in, say, Myanmar, is.

Secondly they were competing with as well as trying to crush the communist Party. LKY co-opted a lot of their policies as well as trying to crush them. Note the essentially Soviet style housing and various effective social security systems. These were popular. This is a pattern that they have followed since (crush the opposition, steal their policies) and it helped fix their schooling system by bringing down class sizes in the 90s. Is that democracy? Kind of.

Singapore isn't proof that if you get the right dictator he can be benevolent. It's proof that the will of the people can be exerted through means other than the ballot box and that even a thug can do the right thing if he lives in fear.

> Firstly the fact that the leaders and all the population are squashed up against one another exerts a massive influence on the government. They're much more vulnerable to protest than other governments because they can't hide as easily. This makes them much more nervous and more willing to placate the populace than the government in, say, Myanmar, is.

Singaporean here. They've done well in the 55 years we've been around to make sure that people don't protest — people here value wealth and personal comfort over the thought of going to jail for their freedoms.

Even a solo person holding up a smiley face might get charged and indicted for an "assembly" in Singapore: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55068007

According to this article (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53146360) the Singapore contact tracing app works the same way the iOS and Android do, so no location tracking.

From my read of the situation, there is some worry that activists might be cracked down upon.

The difference is that Apple/Google contact tracing gives the user control over their data. Singapore's app works differently. Once someone's app picks up your signal, it's logged on their device and there's no way to delete it. The data is handed over to the authorities who have a list of everyone that they interacted with. Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/apple-google-contact-...

> Once someone's app picks up your signal, it's logged on their device and there's no way to delete it.

Unless they've changed the schema, it should be just a SQLite database [1].

Most people with some competence at app development should be able to access the data file on their (Android) phones, and delete any rows which might prove troublesome.

They could also just uninstall the app and wipe all data if they want.

[1] https://medium.com/@frankvolkel/tracetogether-under-the-hood...

Activists are already cracked down plenty. Here's one currently under criminal investigation for holding up a sign with a smiley face (and nothing else) on it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55068007

The New Zealand app is local storage only (at least that’s how it’s marketed, I’m not sure if this has been validated by a third party)

https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...

And how would you know if there was a backdoor that allows the government to pull anyone's data? Even if the app is validated by reliable third party in current version, there's no mechanism stopping a malicious update in few months.

Once it's mandatory to have such app it's game over. Doesn't matter what algorithm is being used, doesn't matter who developed it. It's insanely easy to abuse this. The government will simply deny there's any sort of backdoor and gaslight people who say otherwise.

Can't wait until few years down we learn this data has been abused to harass political opponents in some way. Or when someone runs experiment to pull everyone's data and use ML to predict crimes (Minority Report style). It's done, we are never escaping the "sanitary" regime (just as we never got back to world pre-2001 despite extensive war on terror).

Surprising. It seems usually a bad idea to trust a government.

That really depends on where you are in the world.

Not really. It might be good now, but no guarantees that it will stay that way. Principle of least privilege and data should be the norm but sadly it never is.

> Not really. It might be good now, but no guarantees that it will stay that way.

By that definition there really aren't any entities that you can trust. Including family, friends, etc.

You cannot compare individual, and abstract entities such as states.

Humans feel empathy. States (and corporations) only follow interests.

>Humans feel empathy. States (and corporations) only follow interests.

This is such a bizarre statement to me. States and corporations are made of people. For the states and corporations to lack empathy it means the people controlling them are lacking empathy.

people without empathy ends up either in prison, or as a top dog.

So yeah, IMO corporations and states are ruled by ruthless people. I do not trust them at all.

States and corporations have incentives/ goals (which is actually independent from any single human inside the organization). The incentives then got turn into smaller incentives for the human that they are made of. For states and corporations to have empathy, the empathy of the human inside will need to be stronger than their incentives. This is a lot different than a single human only need empathy to not do bad things.

Its bizzare that you doubt it - you mist have been fortunate to never have been harmed by a faceless bureaucracy.

There is an entire genre of kafkaesque literature, where the whole system is so broken that even top officials synpathetic to your plight cannot help you.

There is 'computer says no' situation where a bank clerk wants to give you a mortgage, but cannot because the computer system flagged something, but wont tell you or him what it is.

This is a well known and understood problem, to argue that it doesnt exist is just to live in denial.

The bureaucracy stops being faceless the moment you encounter a human. If the human is unwilling to help you, that is on that human. If that human is unable to help you, that is the human who put that obstacle in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy isn't making any actions itself.

To be clear, I am not defending governments, corporations, or bureaucracies. I am pointing out those things are too often used as a shield so the individual can divorce themselves from the results of their actions.

Would you be able to force your company to make a donation of $100 to save someone's life? Like actually get a major corporation like Google to move the money out of their bank account as a regular rank-and-file developer? If not, are you evil, or is Google evil?

The system is often setup in such a way that the person who is setting the rules doesn't see their impact and doesn't even know you exist, and the person who sees your plight is powerless to help you. Cruel system can arise with no intention, just stupidity.

>Would you be able to force your company to make a donation of $100 to save someone's life?

Maybe it is because I work for a company that has a value measured in the singular billions rather than the singular trillions like Google, but the answer is yes. I could rather easily get $100 of company money to save a life. You are going to have to set the cost much higher than $100 before it gets to the point that I couldn't get that done myself or with the help of someone I already have a direct relationship with.

>The system is often setup in such a way that the person who is setting the rules doesn't see their impact and doesn't even know you exist, and the person who sees your plight is powerless to help you. Cruel system can arise with no intention, just stupidity.

Those rules are often setup specifically to give the people who see your plight an out for acting without empathy. That doesn't mean there is never an opportunity for them to give in to their empathy and bend some rules. It also doesn't mean that the person who set the rules is innocent or ignorant of the harm they did. They just absolve themselves of it through their own lack of empathy. It is not them committing these acts, it is "the company".

I feel that it's more the fact that a single person is always the same person (physically) over their lifetime, while a state and corporation is a rotating door of people and philosophies. The same idea as how a Monarchy can be a fine government system until you get that one terrible king.

And why the focus on governments? Is the same risk not present with private corporations?

Governments can legally kill you

(It's better to say states but the effect is much the same.)

The probability you can switch a corporation is much higher.

On the contrary, I have moved 3 countries but can't avoid Google, AWS and the rest of suveliance capitalism.

it is a generic statement. applies to most things you can think of if not all.

The alternative is trusting corporations, who also give your data to the government. Who do you trust with power then?

Me. My wife.

It seems exceptional to me to have relatives with the exact same hygiene on data protection. In my experience it's often yet another party I'm forced to give "my" (our) data to. Who then give it to corporations again, and so on. But I certainly respect that everyone could have different experiences in this area.

It should say 'contact' instead of contract.

Thanks. Fixed.

sort of related, but there is an open database over at WiGLE.net which has WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses stored with timestamps and GPS coordinates

so, if you were within range of a device scanning wireless bands at a certain time in a certain place, light forensic analysis of your phone, wearables, car, etc. could place you in the vicinity of a crime with up to dozens of times the resolution of mobile network tracking

you bought the burner phone, the burner SIM card, disposed of them by ..burning, but drat! that blasted Fitbit got you fingered

and that's just one example of open involuntary surveillance. scanners can be small, cheap and housed anywhere with minimal electrical power. in urban areas it would be trivial to track permanently and store indefinitely someone's minute-by-minute position, especially in conjunction with known CCTV blindspots

Singapore is a surveillance state. Don't be fooled by its corporate friendliness and general societal progress.

The government is every bit authoritarian which at this point increasingly looks like a euphemism for totalitarian.

https://www.aristeon.net/2019/04/singapore-as-pioneer-of-cap...

>Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of credible opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...

Corporate friendliness is not a disguise. It's needed to sustain the surveillance state cashflow.

As for general societal progress, I am really not sure what are you talking about. There is no progress whatsoever.

> There is no progress whatsoever.

Economic progress is a thing. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview

> Singapore is a high-income economy with a gross national income of US$54,530 per capita, as of 2017. The country provides one of the world’s most business-friendly regulatory environment for local entrepreneurs and is ranked among the world’s most competitive economies.

> In the decades after independence, Singapore rapidly developed from a low-income country to a high-income country. GDP growth in the city-state has been amongst the world’s highest, at an average of 7.7% since independence and topping 9.2% in the first 25 years.

It is, but original commenter was referring to societal progress which I found interesting.

Never been to Singapore, but if there’s really low crime rate and people don’t litter on the streets - I’d call that progress.

i dont understand this focus on litter on the streets. yes clean streets is wonderful but i dont rank it anywhere near freedom of speech and social equality or something like standardized healthcare in importance.

my hunch is that "clean streets" is mostly important to those who are not sensitive to social injustice...

If you start from the proposition that the state implements the will of the people and the state's laws are just and true, then a strong state is a just state.

After all, if you can't enforce anti-littering laws, how can you hope to enforce anti-discrimination laws? To be effective at convert the law's promises into reality is a good thing, if the laws are a good thing.

Of course, I don't accept the proposition and I don't think anyone else does either - otherwise lawmakers would all have retired because their work was done.

Yeah well, people have different priorities.

If you'd stay here for a while, you'd understand why there is low crime rate and no litter on the street. What even probably surprise you more is why it's happening and what it has to do with progress. Short answer - nothing.

I can’t argue with you cause I don’t live there. But everywhere I live people complain and say government isn’t doing anything.

Singaporean here. There's low violent crime, but I wouldn't suggest that people leave their wallets and phones around in a public area.

Some people still litter on the streets, and it's shameful if one gets caught by law enforcement [1]. Singapore hires lots of cleaners to clean it up. We're nowhere as gracious as the residents of Japan or Taiwan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_work_order

> We're nowhere as gracious as the residents of Japan or Taiwan.

I don't know enough about Taiwan to comment, but the 'cleanliness' of Japanese is exaggerated in many ways:

1) there's a very large population of smokers and I see them everyday throwing their cigarette butts on the streets.

2) yes, Japanese tend to be quite clean when people are looking (social pressure). However, go in places where nobody's there or nobody's watching, like mountains, and you will see massive amounts of litter dropped by hikers. Go on a beach that's not too frequented, and find out someone did a barbecue party the night before and left all their trash behind. Come back from a firework at night and watch your step as you walk on thousands of plastic bento boxes dropped on the floor after consumption.

So, let's tone down the myths a little.

Can attest this being not the case, unless you are a bank, and can hire gazillion of local barristers to keep up with frequently changing regulatory theatrics.

For example, labour laws are faaar from what people imagine of Singapores ultracapitalist image.

I had a friend that worked there for a few years. He was all set to come home for a holiday and management waltzed in and just told everybody holidays were suspended. He still got to come home as he was something of a special case but it was a good story for us ...

Also the legend of the bank who called a fire drill then revoked everyone’s security when they were out of the building and told them they were laid off ...

Yes, fire at will is there, on the other hand you have quite potent wrongful termination lawsuits, and a number of hiring quotas which are often enforced.

Singapore is probably the only country which would force a business to hire somebody with clinically severe mental development issues.

> Singapore is probably the only country which would force a business to hire somebody with clinically severe mental development issues.

On the other hand, mental conditions are heavily stigmatised in Singapore.

No government-linked company (and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund has its fingers in most large and up-and-coming companies here) would hire someone on a career track if they have a diagnosed mental condition of some sort, anxiety and depression included.

Public health insurance downplays the severity of most mental conditions, but the status quo seems to be slowly improving: https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore/move-include-addictions-se...

I actually have family there, and they have literally transitioned from near poverty to upper middle class in 2 decades. This was pretty widespreadc, but gradually becoming forgotten as the younger generations grow up in comforts that their precessors never knew.

A lot of this is due to their education system. It can be outright propaganda at times, but it has proven very effective at increasing literacy nation wide.

They've also made internet access an strategic initiative. When you marry a literate population with (generally, wink wink) free access to information and a seemingly draconian government, you get a very interesting bunch of people.

And this article written by William Gibson is still relevant all these years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

Singapore also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, at only 1.16 children per woman. Living in a controlled and apartment-dominated country seems to crush the desire and ability to have many children.

Correlation != causation. I expected HN readers to know that.

GP said it seems, and just because correlation doesn't imply causation doesn't mean everything that correlates literally cannot have a causal relationship.

In other words... just because there's a correlation between things being correlated and things not being causally related, that doesn't mean that correlation causally implies acausality?

The default mode when operating with data is to assume there’s no causation. Doing otherwise creates room for too many misconceptions and erroneous interpretations.

Clearly you can make a hypothesis though.

I suspect the fact that it's very densely populated and extremely expensive to live in has more to do with it. Couples can generally only afford to move out into their own apartments in their thirties, and the ancillary costs of schooling (tuition etc) if you want your kids to succeed rack up so fast that few can afford more than 1 or 2.

> Couples can generally only afford to move out into their own apartments in their thirties

It's also a cultural thing. Most people can afford to rent in their twenties, but plenty of families discourage it.

Subsidised public housing is available to married couples, and to singles 35 and above — but the wait time for new public housing with a 99-year lease is 3-4 years [1], which probably also affects the birth rate.

[1] https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/news-and-publicat...

Why did you choose those two variables out of dozens of others?

If it's 'control' then why is birthrate high in many dictatorships? If it's apartments, why is birthrate decent in many ex-soviet countries full of apartments?

Lack of birth control maybe? Or relatively uneducated women?

So general societal progress and their control of covid is evil?

The 'tracking for criminal cases' is clearly a 'bad thing' but ... it's also legit democracy with excellent universal healthcare and rule of law.

... careful with the easy characterizations.

Any perceived "societal progress" comes at a (heavy) cost of personal liberties; the Singapore government have always "preferred" the former.

> it's also legit democracy

If your interpretation of a democracy boils down to mere voting rights and choice, then sure, it's legit. But I think we should also consider the trickle-down effects of having the same party in power ever since the government was formed. Your ethics, beliefs, judgment, and mentality determines how you vote - it's not that hard to sway the majority to your side if you are always in total control of how lives are shaped across generations.

You are saying that those voters who are making choices of their own free will - are dim? (There is no voter suppression, murder of journalists or opposition after all) And consistently vote against their own best interests? Rather an Orientalist view, no?

> Singapore is a surveillance state.

And the Australian Covid tracing app is a copy/paste from the public open sourced github repo the Singapore government shared.

I guess being part of FiveEyes makes any fantasy of me _not_ living in a surveillance state pretty lame...

Having an app per country was unnecessary to begin with. All that Google and Apple had to do is supply the UI and accept government requests to enable the system in their country.

Apple and Google’s “exposure notification” is less useful in some important ways - it isn’t capable of backtracking to find associated contacts of infections further back in the chain. Bunnie has a good blog post about that here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=69

Apple and Google’s thing was late to the party too, both Singapore and Australia had published their apps before the in built OS exposure notification because a thing (and I’d ballpark over 90% of Android phones haven’t got OS upgrades available that let them use the Google one anyway, none of my Android devices have it, being stuck with no manufacturer support or locked down by carriers).

So Australia and Singapore pushed on with their non OS native versions of the apps, even though the Bluetooth implementation on iOS made it very unreliable if the app wasn’t running and in the foreground. (The Android version’s Bluetooth is more reliable, if just chews through battery at a very quick pace...)

The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/15/covid...

Just 20 “close contacts” identified, and the government stalling on freedom of information requests to find out if any active cases were identified from those.

> The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here

The article seems to blame the lack of uptake.

Singapore doesn't have this problem, having dangled further relaxation of lockdown restrictions if more of its residents downloaded the app: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-e...

> And the Australian Covid tracing app is a copy/paste from the public open sourced github repo the Singapore government shared.

The GitHub repo has a "reference" implementation of the published BlueTrace protocol [1].

Encryption keys aside, it's not possible to reproduce the Singapore TraceTogether builds currently released on both the iOS and Google App stores.

[1] https://bluetrace.io/

Same in germany

Well, according to Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt: If you have nothing to hide, then you don’t need to worry about your privacy.

Edit: I’m getting downvoted. But I wrote this as a warning: that if you don’t value your privacy, then others, will make sure that you have no privacy.

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