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Comment by lgvln | Hacker News Reader

Let’s not forget the whole fiasco with Singapore’s TraceTogether app for contact tracing during the pandemic. The actual implementation of it differs significantly from the white paper they open-sourced. The actual app does not anonymize the data and the government has access to everyone’s location and interaction data. Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed the data for investigation purposes. There is no constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any laws so it was mostly an “oops, too bad, we didn’t do anything ‘wrong’” moment for them.

https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/...

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/31...

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Good thing the United States has a constitutional amendment that totally protects us from having our location data harvested sold and deanonymized by thousands of data brokers!

This practice should extend to the private sector in my opinion. Protection of location data should fall under the 14th amendment.

My favorite comment. Let's ignore any valid criticism and complain about something else instead.

The unfortunate reality is a lot of people post comments like GP but do so reflexively to deride non-US governments then play defense for posts critical of the US. Some do it for China, and so on. It would help in general if people are reasonably (emphasis on reasonably) skeptical of all states.

Let’s not pretend that China’s laws and norms are comparable to those of the US here, though. Yes, it’s reasonable to be skeptical of all states, but there’s definitely a difference of degree in state overreach.

Simply not true. For every (actual, not just FLG disinfo) overreach of Beijing you can find one for Washington

You are more likely to be permanently incarcerated in America than China

That is right, hard to survive a firing squad

A firing squad is just another form of lethal injection.

They are comparable. China is still worse, but:

1) I fully expect to see the US government make up most of the US economy by spending in my lifetime (I'd argue they are already there, but that involves an argument I don't feel like typing).

2) COVID shows us that the US government also sees their role as deploying an invasive level of social control for The Greater Good. COVID level threats aren't going to be that rare, we'll see another one in our lifetimes.

3) The US government pioneered using phones to support a global surveillance apparatus (probably military too, I expect more than one missile has been targeted on an iPhone).

So to repeat myself, although I'd still rather take the Americans than the Chinese, these are not categorically different things. They see their roles as the same and their methods are converging. Especially on the subject of surveillance and the risks it poses to ordinary people.

2) is a weird objection to level given as almost all restrictions have been lifted in the US and China remains a repressive nightmare on this issue as it has been since 2020. The US did not come anywhere near what China did with regards to lockdowns. And it’s a core responsibility of all states to protect their citizens. Overall our response was bad but we developed effective vaccines that have mostly saved us now while China refuses to use them for nationalistic reasons. Very different situations.

China lacks rule of law, or even an attempt at it: the Chinese government has stated that the notion of rule of law is just western imperialism. This is why, China having a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and so on, is completely meaningless (no independent judiciary means the law is whatever officials claim it is) whereas an attempt of rule of law is actually made in the USA, even if it is far from perfect.

Ironically, we are debating Singapore in parent, which has extremely strong rule of law, but the laws are such that security is prioritized.

I bet the guys taken blindfolded by CIA, questioned in the middle of somewhere, and then brought back, will fully agree how much better the US system happens to be.

Naturally the ones that survived the question process.

It’s not that there’s nothing to criticize about the US and this example is one of the worst things the US does. However a key difference is that the CIA is not doing this to American citizens, we can be sure that if it were there would be considerably more outrage. In China this sort of treatment is on the table for anyone who crosses the line.

Ah that makes all the difference, and naturally CIA does follow the "law" and never does anything in-house.

Snowden and others in similar spots don't have any reason to worry about.

Ya, that occasionally happens in the USA. In China, however, that’s just a Tuesday.

Nothing to worry about then, just a statistic rounding error of a couple of poor fellows that were occasionally on the wrong spot.

Binarism (that there is only right and wrong, and not a large spectrum of gray scale in between) is one of those huge fallacies that allows one to claim that China and the USA are basically the same, when in reality, neither is white or black but one is much closer to black than the other.

True, yet acting as US is a country that should be a moral example where such things never happen also doesn't help, a country where having the wrong skin colour might be a death sentence when stoped by the police.

Not much different than being stop by the police in more dubious countries.

A scale it is.

Are we talking about China or the USA? Because having the wrong skin color is also dangerous in China as well (eg being caught African or Uighur in Guangzhou). I get it: the USA is more diverse so ethnic tension is much more common, but China has the same issues, even worse, just papered over a 90% Han majority focused into the east. Frankly, China’s ethnic tensions are a hundred years behind the states.

I think the point was, we can't use the fact US (or China, or state X) is a corrupt basket case to lazily dismiss any valid criticism here. That's like dismissing the teachers criticism of an A grade student's English Literature exam question by saying "Yeah well, Ralph's answer was 'boobs'". Ralph exists. The A grade student wants to improve. These are separate concerns.

What is the value of this comment? The US government, privacy in the US, and the like is already discussed frequently here. People are also aware of it so you aren't bringing it to light.

I think it's fair, given that GP mentioned "There is no constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any laws". There's a long history to the debate of whether there's a constitutional right to privacy in the US; it's not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution but it's a fairly common interpretation nowadays, so whether or not the courts in the US would consider it legal if the US government did this is not a sure thing either way.

lgvln wasn't comparing it to the US. quinnjh was the one who brought up the US.

Looked at a wiki article, and it looks like not many states have a "right to privacy" in their constitution but rather have it specified by various other laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy

My point was that there's disagreement about whether the US has a right to privacy, compared to in Singapore which, at least based on the comments in the thread, it seems like there's consensus that there isn't one.

TraceTogether is being phased out as the end of the pandemic nears. Haven't had to use it for weeks now.

As for privacy issue - they ended up stating that they would only use it for serious crimes e.g. they used it in a murder investigation. Seems like a reasonable compromise for better public safety.

(I recognize that not everyone will agree on that, but the level of safety and security in Singapore is mind blowing.)

The US is large enough to have had its government break promises like this time and again. That’s why you’ll see a lot of people on here that will object to a design requiring you to trust the owners of your infrastructure.

Signal is the chief example of this kind of design. All they can provide a government is the creation date of someone’s account, and the last time they tried to check for messages. Neither message content nor metadata (who sent messages to whom) is accessible, assuming the app follows the design and the design doesn’t have defects.

> Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed the data for investigation purposes

Australia is also complicit in abusing COVID contact tracing datasets. At least in one well publicised case, a police officer accessed someone's location information even without requesting a court order first because… well, it made sense to the police officer. There are likely other instances of the contact tracing abuse, however they are likely to have been quietly swept under the rug.

To be honest, I am actually kind okay with that, at least the public now knows what is being tracked and not, so in a sense, there is no secrecy in the trace-together saga.

This commentary is incredibly inaccurate. The code of version 1 of tracetogether was open sourced in April 2020. The server side wasn't open sourced. There was a hardware based version of tt that went through a community based tear down and it was reliably determined to be only doing (as did the phone app version) ONLY bluetooth-based contact collection. At NO time is any GPS or location data collected. The hardware token only has a bt based hardware and nothing else.

It is true that the Government kept insisting that there is no way the data will be used for any other use and the minister who kept repeating that in parliament subsequently had to apologise that it was indeed used for a murder case. But, legislation was introduced to specifically limit the use cases of any of the data collected - https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/proposed-restrictions....

The contact data in the phone or hardware token is stored for 21 days in a rolling manner with only the latest 21 days available and should there be a need to send the data to the health authorities in the event that there is a need for actual contact tracing, the data extraction is a two step process: a) the owner of the device (phone/token) has to agree to the extraction b) there is a OTP-like code sent to the individual for it to be entered into the phone for the data to be extracted.

Now, should the person deem that he/she does not want to make the data available, the app in the phone can be deleted and be done with. At which point nothing much can be done for subsequent contact tracing.

The right to privacy of data etc is embodied in the Personal Data Protection Act of 2012 (https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/PDPA2012) and all of the data in the app/token is convered by that law.

Yes, trust in the Singapore Government dropped many notches when it was revealed that despite numerous assurances that data won't be used for anything else, that it was indeed used and for a specific criminal investigation, it left a bad impression that the SG govt has not recovered from yet. Suffice to say, as of last month, you can delete the phone app and just take the battery out of the hardware token and be done with it. There are, however, a small set of scenarios where the "SafeEntry checkin" via the tt/token is needed - for places where there are large number of people attending, like weddings, concerts, etc. What I've done is to "force stop" the app in the phone, deny bluetooth access to it and just keep the app still installed.

the road to hell is paved with good intentions let not forget SG is a sort of single party system with no real freedom of press.

And that’s a big part of why their country is wealthy and successful while their neighboring countries are disasters.

Any prove?

Korea and Japan rose from the ashes (Japan having lost WWII after their imperialist ambitions failed) in the same amount of time. Korea had a dictatorship or sorts but Japan didn't, but unless I'm mistaken, neither government was as autocratic (and still is) like the PAP is today.

If they were less autocratic, and they still won elections, they’d do okay. The problem would be if they lost.

The first Korean Republic (1948-1960) was vastly more repressive than the PAP at its worst, let alone today. Mass arrests of political opponents, reeducation camps, massacres: you name it, Rhee did it. The second republic (1960 to 1961) was theoretically a liberal democracy, but got couped almost immediately. After that, South Korea remained a somewhat milder developmental dictatorship, ala Singapore, until 1987.

Japan was a de facto one party state for most of the post war period.

good question, maybe because their neighbouring countries have a strong relationship to a certain religion (1) and (2) SG used to be a GB colony like HK which is doing great as well.

Hong Kong under British rule was an autocracy too. Sure, they had Western civil liberties, but no real democracy.

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