In Singapore, Covid vs. privacy is no contest
lowyinstitute.org
lowyinstitute.org
I am afraid that as this virus will stay, even if becoming far less threatening thanks to vaccines, society will keep seeing those measures as necessary to 'keep numbers low' and that we'll never really go back to the way things were before
And do you feel your country should go back to normal (a) when the danger is over or (b) when You feel You had enough?
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/key-indica...
That's just one page of many on that site, for just one county out of however many counties there are in the U. S. So I believe it unnecessary to act as if there are not easily-accessed answers to your questions.
The danger will be over as soon as COVID becomes nothing to be worried about. As soon as everyone who wants to can get vaccinated and as soon as everyone who can't be vaccinated don't have to worry about it due to herd immunity.
It's very simple.
A much better approach is to define an acceptable level and live with Covid, much like we live with the flu, cancer and other deadly diseases.
The US seems to be the most sane part of the world in this regard.
That's an important question, and reasonable people can and should disagree on the exact answer. But the proper response is not to throw up our hands!
This question is not significantly more difficult than other questions that most legal systems routinely deal with, like "Precisely how clean does a restaurant kitchen need to be?" or "What exactly constitutes fraud/murder/etc.?" or "How exactly do we determine if a driver was under the influence of alcohol?" or "How educated and skilled must a surgeon be?"
These are all difficult questions with direct consequences on personal liberties, public health, etc. Many of them have fairly uncontroversial answers for a large portion of cases, but they also have tricky edge cases where reasonable people disagree. Legal systems ought to (and generally do) attempt to clearly codify things to handle the large portion of cases, while also having some process for resolving conflicts for the tricky edge cases.
It's simply not reasonable to imply that basic public health mandates in response to a pandemic is some new or uniquely difficult scenario for legal systems to face, and that because it's difficult, legal systems should do absolutely nothing whatsoever.
This is real, it's measurable and it's time-limited.
First time ever in 20 years of Erdogan’s reign, there’s an opposition for banning alcohol sales.
However I want to emphasize that it’s not the Covid-19 started the restrictions.
First was gone the sale of alcohol in train restaurants. Then the they restricted the hours to sell in shops, they said somewhere in Europe there are similar restrictions so don’t worry. Step by step more and more restrictions came into play. Too close to school, too close to a mosque etc. etc.
The risks of having your freedoms taken don’t come from the covid-19 measures.
Events like these are just catalyst. Think how many freedoms were lost after 9/11.
Unfortunately stuff that you can’t ignore happens, then you have to react and when you react people with their own agenda also react. It’s a dynamic system.
It's easy to be pro lockdown if it's boosting your profits and harming your competitors.
For some reason this whole mask thing has really gotten people all worked up about their rights, over such a tiny thing. Suddenly, everyone is Braveheart--fighting for their freedom against the oppression of... uh... wearing a little piece of cloth on their face. I mean, generations past were drafted off to war for their country, many of them losing their lives. Talk about your freedom being under attack! Today people are losing their minds over a piece of cloth.
not disagreeing with the bottom half of the post but can we not forget that the US lost more than half a million people and accounted for abouth a fifth of global deaths. We're still in this thing and the usual indifference to disaster appears to be setting in
Those are just the restrictions actively enforced. Technically one can't go more than 10 km from their house, but I'm not sure how much that's really enforced.
If France is on the same course as the UK, then they will have to reach 50% vaccinated for the first time, before the government will lift many of the restrictions.
To me curfews that dictate that you cannot go outside is not the european way.
Though the French government has already announced plans to gradually lift restrictions throughout May and June. No telling if they'll stick to it though :)
Is death the European way? In France, the curfew was implemented in order to avoid a more serious lockdown, and tightened when needed, only after hospital admission rates' progression were dangerously close to hospital capacity.
Nobody wants to limit personal freedoms, but considering the alternative was to let hospitals overflow and people die waiting for care, was there really any actual choice?
If temporary limits to personal freedom are the price to pay to not sacrifice your fellow co-citizens.. Who is still arguing against them? Are human lives less important than your right to go outside?
And of course everything is temporary. It has real life economic costs, people don't like it, and there will be elections sooner or later. Even if a power tripping politician likes keeping the population under curfew, they won't last.
Yes, of course. Depending on the number of years potentially lost.
Are there even numbers how many infections occur in supermarkets? Any measurements? What has the government been doing in the past year?
[1] It is of course not politically correct to ask in which population segments such weddings occur.
2. Did it work? How many died in Singapore compared to your country?
EDIT: sorry all. maybe "authoritarian" is a better word?
We shouldn't berate ourselves for not performing the same way island nations in the southern pacific ocean did.
The USA is enormous and has many distinct cultures with very different ideas and interests.
That's a pretty strong claim. The Economist at least classifies it on the lower end of "flawed democracy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index). It's certainly a significantly more democratic than authoritarian counties.
My mental model for Singapore is that the People's Action Party (ruling party) is kind of like a BigCorp, and the other minor parties are like startups. Whenever one of the minor parties starts to do a little too well, the PAP does an "acquisition" of some of their platform. And thus society progresses without ever changing ruling parties.
A vote for the PAP is a vote to maintain the well-run technocratic status quo, and a vote for a minor party is a vote to tell the PAP about some policies you'd like them to adopt.
There is a legitimate debate to be had about district lines that might influence the fairness of the elections (gerrymandering), but many modern democracies have this issue.
Considering that the house of representatives is a fraction of one branch of the us government, your comment falls in the category of "not even wrong."
Japan's LDP was in power for 38 years straight and only was kicked out of office by an economic downturn and corruption scandal (which Singapore has tended to avoid better). It then returned to power again for the next 15 years.
That doesn't make Japan a dictatorship.
A government having the power to decide and enforce public policy doesn't make it a dictatorship, it makes it powerful.
How's that for "strong government "?
But, when you enter the country they specifically tell you that you can be jailed and/or beaten for some offences, including overstaying your visa.
Read also this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
If that policy were delivered and administered by a democratic government, it'd also not be an example of 'dictatorship'.
The US has a democracy and executes people for murder. The government can kill you? What a dictatorship.
I lived in Singapore for a very long time. It’s very strict. But it’s certainly not a dictatorship. If you want to try and understand it, these sorts of comments are not helpful.
The PAP could technically be unseated but it's unlikely due to gerrymandering and their use of the courts to silence the opposition.
A dictatorship exists even if technically it could be unseated, just with no practical means available.
How so?
Also what surprised me was how little of a distinct Singaporean identity there is. The legal system is very British, culturally there's a huge Chinese influence obviously, but I couldn't really figure out if there's something that's really distinctly Singaporean (except for Singlish).
Heh. In Israel, and even before the pandemic, the political police (the "Shin-Bet") has the cellular operators save your location history (indefinitely? who knows) for them to query for their shady ends, and sometimes even for regular police to have access to.
During the pandemic, this was used to retrace movements of sars-ncov-2-test-positive people, and to inform people they were in contact with they should self-quarantine. The funny thing was that the quarantine had a bunch of loopholes, and you don't have to carry your phone with you, and nobody would check up on you, and the airport was basically wide open until early this year, so the whole clamp-down was half-theatrical and we got the further legitimization of mass surveillance without even the potential upside.
(Now, In Israel, things have improved because of vaccination, not other reasons; but the government won't allow the Palestinians in the 1967-occupied territories, the ones without citizenship, to get vaccinated, so they're not faring that well.)
Anyway, it's pretty bad.
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It feels wrong to loop in the anonymized TraceTogether technology with other genuinely egregious privacy violations of the Singaporean government.
The Android/Apple exposure notifications API[0] rolled out in the early days of the pandemic is a pretty solid example IMO of handling privacy correctly. The protocol generates you a new anonymous ID every 20 minutes and locally remembers the last ~30 days of ids. Through BTLE, it collects the anonymous ids of other phones that it's within range of (and for how long), and remembers them locally for ~30 days. When someone voluntarily self-reports as COVID-positive, the API broadcasts the list anonymous ids used during their likely contagious period, allowing other phones to locally recognize if they've been exposed, and for how long.
It's hard to imagine a more private version of this with any amount of usefulness. Unless I'm missing something (which I may well be!), the privacy loss the article refers can only happen if:
1. The police can legally and physically confiscate and unlock your phone
2. The police can legally and physically confiscate and unlock the phone of the person they suspect you of being/not being within 20 feet of
3. It was less than a month ago
4. There were no other eyewitnesses or evidence of the contact
The first one, of course, also gives them access to plenty of other data we think of as private.
Because this scenario exists, you can definitely make an argument that phones are a little less private with TraceTogether than without. But with the rarity and narrowness of the breach, I have a hard time putting it even remotely close to the other pieces of the article, describing 24/7 security cameras and exposing confidential lawyer correspondences.
The article concludes:
> What’s less considered is the sheer volume of data, and the variety of types of data that the state is collecting, allowing it to piece together people’s lives with much more detail than we might realise.
...and, well, I completely agree. That's exactly the context the article seems to lack.
It's also a broader problem: How do we effectively define and communicate a right to privacy when the volume is what's so important?
[0] https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/apple-google-contact-...