Singapore as a host state is no secret.
The country is well known, for example, for banning the import and sale of gum for the sake of cleaning. Less well-known, however, is that the legislation also prohibits touching any musical tool “in such a way as to embarrass”, and that the law establishes who uses a public restroom to scare him away later or threaten a hefty fine. .
But as the city-state takes ordinary action to combat a coronavirus outbreak that has inflamed tens of thousands of residents, the government appears to be interfering in citizens’ lives in a more direct way.
At the same time, however, those same measures, adding those that have the merit of a large collection of knowledge in the privacy perspective, can also play with Singapore’s laudable successes by avoiding some of the worst effects of the pandemic.
While compromise may pose difficulties in the West, where, for the worse or worse, non-public freedoms defend themselves fiercely, Singapore’s technique and its citizens’ obvious willingness to settle for it recommend a basic difference in their belief in their own perception of citizens. Public.
“The biggest fear now is to involve the virus well and insinuate others who contacted suspected cases as temporarily as possible. Although there is a threat of a leak in our data, involving the virus is more important,” Annice Cheong, a citizen of Singapore, told VICE News.
Some of Singapore’s anti-COVID measures are reminiscent of those taken around the world, although they are applied more strictly, yet Singaporeans like Cheong are more than satisfied to comply. Masking is mandatory and regulations prohibit speaking on public transport or socializing on teams of more than five people, including fines, criminal convictions and deportations (for non-citizens) paid to criminals.
With more than 50,000 instances now, the COVID outbreak in Singapore was first and for all one of the worst in Southeast Asia. However, the country of 5.7 million other people recorded only 27 deaths. This is partly due to a robust tracking, detection and isolation framework, which had already developed at the time of SARS and was temporarily placed when the first instances of COVID-19 reached the island’s shores in January.
As a component of its reaction to coronavirus and to strengthen its tactile search efforts, GovTech, a program of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, has implemented a touch search app that bounces Bluetooth signals between users’ phones to determine if they are close to someone who has tested positive for COVID, potentially creating a map of a person’s close touches the day. Residents are strongly advised to download the app and take contact with the component.
The branch office has also implemented TraceTogether tokens, portable devices that also exchange and record Bluetooth signals between nearby devices to keep track of users’ close contacts. The aircraft has already been delivered to elderly residents. Meanwhile, GovTech has also introduced a national virtual registration formula for all companies, public spaces and places of worship.
According to the TraceTogether website, there are 2.1 million users of the tracking app, or just under 40% of the population. The Government of Singapore has stated in the past that the figure is preferably more than 75%.
When the new generation was released, the Minister in connection with the Smart Nation initiative tried to emphasize that without a GPS chip, he cannot track an individual’s location and that encrypted knowledge never leaves a user’s device or phone.
However, despite official assurances, some are still involved about the possibility of misuse of the data, either through the government or from a third party who could borrow.
But for the vast majority of Singaporeans, there is a high point of trust in government and an implicit confidence that it is appropriate to sacrifice individual rights for public safety. Even in the midst of a spiral public aptitude crisis, Singaporean confidence in government has increased by 3% to 70%, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, published last month.
Seah Jun Zhi, a Singaporean, said he was confident the government would do the right thing. “You may not believe how government can misuse this knowledge. In fact, Google has already started collecting that location-based knowledge for years. This deserves to be a more vital concern.”
Visitors pass through the singapore Zoo temperature domain in Singapore on July 6, 2020, the first day of its reopening to the public after the charm was temporarily closed due to considerations of the new COVID-19 coronavirus. Roslan RAHMAN / AFP
Some, however, are so sure.
“I don’t agree to hand over all this information,” said Jag, a Singaporean who would only give his first name. “I feel like I’m in Big Brother right now, where all my movements are being monitored. I hope the government doesn’t continue to do it forever.”
“We all know how the science of knowledge and research works. I’ve had cases where I’ve talked about locating a new gym with my friends and the next time I’m on Facebook or looking for something, all my classified ads are about gyms. So I think they can do a lot more with the data about us, especially with the tactile search and registry entries,” Jag added.
In fact, the Singapore government is not known for prioritizing civil liberties. In addition to its most imaginative legislation on public use and use, Singapore also strictly restricts freedom of expression and the press, and has been accused of selling a political formula hostile to challengers. The country has been ruled through the same political party, the PAP, since independence.
Meanwhile, in the United States, where strong civil liberties are perceived as basic values, a cynical politicization of anti-epymic measures has combined with a long-standing reverence of individualism to create a fierce debate about the obligations, if any, of individual citizens. Contribute. pandemic reaction – up and adding measurements like dressed in a mask. In this context, infections have skyrocketed, with more than four million cases of coronavirus reported and more than 1 in 5,000 deaths.
Some have speculated that this obvious division in the belief of non-public freedoms is a cultural construct based on the fact that one comes from a collectivist society, like many nations in Asia, or individualistic, typical of many Western countries.
However, Elvin Lim, professor of political science and dean at the University of Management of Singapore, said that while this generalization might have some truth, that is not why some Western countries have behaved better than others.
“I suppose the most specific task is, first of all, the degree of acceptance as true with respect to the state apparatus. Without a minimum of one or the other of those elements, no government can govern,” he said.
Harish Pillay, the leading generation architect of open source software provider Red Hat and opposition candidate in Singapore’s recent general election, also cited trust as a vital factor. He invited through the Minister of Smart Nation to dismantle the new TraceTogether token, and concluded that there was nothing destructive in the generation.
However, while it supports the use of great knowledge to combat the virus, it advocates more checks and balances, as well as attention to individual rights.
“If you look at countries like the United States, they come from other non-public freedoms and freedoms. It’s not like we don’t have any of those things, we got them! But I’d probably say we’re ready to settle for the argument and say, “You know what? It’s a bigger factor than my non-public freedom,” he said.
“The challenge at the end of the day lies in the levels. One is the confidence in the government that the collected knowledge will not be used for negative purposes,” Pillay said.
Dr. Leong Hoe Nam, a well-known infectious disease expert, believes that there is surely great knowledge in the war against coronavirus and argues that, unlike Americans, Singaporean highs are comfortable with the sacrifice of non-public freedoms for safety.
“CoVID-19’s tactile search using SARS 2003 strategies was replaced and highly ineffective. We want the game. We want to use electronic measurements. We want to think about tracking one way or another,” Leong said.
“I daresay that 60 to 80 consistent with the penny of the population will cede this free and seamless right to cooperate with society, cooperate with the government. A component of that is a component of the values of Confucianism that are rooted in us, in our education, in our education. It’s still our culture.”
However, Lim noted that an “individualistic” culture only leads to non-compliance with antivirus measures, as measures such as the use of a mask also gain advantages for the individual. Success in the opposite combat of the virus, he said, has so much to do with the ability of governments to diminish the “free instinct,” the feeling that if many others wear a mask, it doesn’t matter if they don’t. T.
“Individualism tends to happen with anti-stadism … [but] conscious individualism does not save you voluntary social estrangement,” he said, noting that “the intuition of freedom” is also rooted in the “disadvantages” associated with antivirus measures
“So one explanation for why the difference in effects is that the nations and governments that controlled the pandemic well were the ones who understood this and skillfully used the state to mitigate the intuition of parasitism.”