Abstract
The wealthy and ‘smart’ city-state of Singapore was one of the first to develop a mobile tracing app called TraceTogether during the coronavirus outbreak. It then pivoted towards developing a wearable tech device in order to reach all 5.7 million residents, brushing off concerns about privacy and surveillance. This article tracks the development of TraceTogether and engages in critical debates that have ensued around the use of the app, namely around the twin implications of privacy protection and the conduct of surveillance in a panoptic and auto-regulatory society that privileges socio-political discipline and control. With health crises and pandemics becoming more commonplace, more people around the world are being persuaded to wear some loss of privacy to trust ‘smart’ technologies to aid us in fighting enemies that are deadly and invisible. Singapore could already be offering a glimpse of how this can be done now, and in the future.
Highlights
The idea of Singapore being a wealthy, fun, beautifully manicured and sophisticated city-state has entered global public consciousness since the start of the 21st century
Apart from the fact that there are few evidences of such technological apparatuses working as they are designed to do (Babones, 2020), we examine why Singaporeans have gradually normalised the encroachment of state surveillance on their lives, even while being concerned about losing privacy
On 26 May 2020, Singapore’s flagship newspaper reported that a government-funded survey by the Institute of Policy Studies, a think-tank affiliated with the National University of Singapore, revealed that 60% of Singaporeans were prepared to trade some privacy for safety by agreeing that TraceTogether tracing app or a similar contact-tracing device should be made mandatory, with its use compulsory for entry to public places, even though some of the respondents did not want to do so on their own phones (Tay, 2020) as these devices were seen as something intrinsically personal and private to their users
Summary
The idea of Singapore being a wealthy, fun, beautifully manicured and sophisticated city-state has entered global public consciousness since the start of the 21st century. Keywords auto-regulation, COVID-19, Panopticon, Singapore, Smart Nation, surveillance, tracing app
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