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Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaHealth & Environment

Coronavirus: how did Singapore get residents to stop worrying and trust its TraceTogether Covid-19 app?

  • The city state says 70 per cent of its population is using the app, touting it as possibly the ‘world’s most successful’ digital contact-tracing programme
  • The likes of Japan and Hong Kong have struggled with similar ventures, with privacy concerns among the main issues cited

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Why you can trust SCMP
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Staff members of Singapore’s Government Technology Agency show off the country’s contact-tracing smartphone app, TraceTogether. Photo: AFP
Dewey Simin Singapore
Singapore this week announced that the country might have the “world’s most successful” digital contact-tracing programme for the coronavirus, with 70 per cent of its population now on board. But three months after the TraceTogether app’s March launch, take-up rates were less than stellar, with many citing privacy concerns. So what changed?
Analysts say the 5.7 million who have now signed up to the app were prompted by the government’s strong messaging. In October, it made clear that while it was not compulsory for residents to download the app to their mobile phones or carry with them a government-issued token, they could be denied entry to places including restaurants and shopping malls starting at the end of December if they did not have either.
When announcing the programme’s uptake rate on Wednesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, who heads the country’s smart nation initiatives, took to social media to thank Singaporeans for their trust and confidence in the government.

Indeed, analysts said Singapore’s numbers were unusually successful compared with other countries around the region that have rolled out similar programmes in recent months only to be met with lukewarm responses. They pointed out that there were several factors that could have stood in the way of citizens opting in to such programmes, including data privacy concerns and a lack of trust.

In May, three months after Singapore had launched its app, only 1.4 million people had downloaded it. At the time, authorities stressed that at least three-quarters of the population had to be using the app – which leverages short-distance Bluetooth signals between mobile phones to detect other participating users – for it to be effective.

Hsu Li Yang, an associate professor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at National University of Singapore (NUS), said many Singaporeans did not understand or trust the authorities’ explanation that data was stored locally on the user’s phone – including location data – and only accessed if the user tested positive for Covid-19.

This was in line with an earlier survey by Singapore-based independent pollster Blackbox Research, which found that 45 per cent of respondents had not downloaded TraceTogether even though they had heard of it, with their main concern that they “did not want the government tracing their movements”.

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