Coronavirus: Singapore limits police use of TraceTogether contact-tracing data to seven types of criminal offences

Name: Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme
Uploaded: 2021-02-02T08:32:34.000Z
Duration: 2 min 3 s
Description: Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme

Law enforcement agencies will only be able to access data from the app for seven types of cases, including terrorism, murder and rape

News that police had access to the data had caused a public outcry, as the government had previously said app would be used only for contact tracing

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Singapore’s contact-tracing app TraceTogether. Photo: AFP

Dewey Sim

Published: 4:32pm, 2 Feb 2021Updated: 10:43pm, 2 Feb 2021

Singapore on Tuesday passed legislation that limits the scenarios in which law enforcement agencies can access data obtained by the government’s coronavirus contact-tracing app.

The development comes as the minister in charge of Singapore’s tracing programme admitted a loophole in the system had raised concerns about data privacy among citizens.

Under the new bill, all government agencies – including law enforcement – would be able to access the data from the TraceTogether app only for contact tracing or for investigating seven types of criminal offences. The bill also requires lawmakers to return to parliament should they wish to expand the number of scenarios in which data can be accessed.

The move follows the government’s disclosure last month that data from TraceTogether could be used in criminal investigations of “serious” – but at the time unspecified – offences and that the police had already accessed it for a murder investigation which took place in May last year.

That disclosure had sparked an outcry from the public, who had previously been told the data would be used only for contact-tracing purposes. Critics said the police’s use of the data was an invasion of privacy and a breach of trust in the government.

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Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme

Vivian Balakrishnan, foreign minister and minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative, said in parliament he took “full responsibility for this mistake” and he deeply regretted the anxiety caused. “Perhaps I was so enamoured by what I thought was the ingenuity and brilliance of this that I got blindsided,” he said.

“In a sense, my own enthusiasm for the technology blindsided me.”