Singapore and petitions have a close relationship in recent years.
Don’t want NDP funpacks because the money could be better used elsewhere? Petition.
Horrified at Lucky Plaza accident and wants to make sure it doesn’t happen again by banning cars for six months? Petition.
Want to make the Singapore Flyer spin faster so we can blow the haze away? Petition.
Yup, petitions are used for all sorts of things.
So are you surprised that there’s a petition to reject wearable devices for contact tracing?
The TraceTogether app, which was created to facilitate contact tracing, wasn’t good enough.
While a whopping 1.5 million people have downloaded the app, around 4/5 of the population in Singapore do not have it.
And even if the app is downloaded, not everyone switched it on.
On 6 June 2020, the Singapore government announces an initiative that’ll solve the problem of contact-tracing:
Wearable Contact-Tracing Devices.
It’s basically a device which achieves the same thing as TraceTogether without the need for a smartphone.
Currently, the government is in the process of developing such a device, but if it proves to be a success, it might be issued to everybody in Singapore.
People Have Started An Online Petition To Reject Wearable Device for Contact Tracing
Shortly after the news broke, a petition “Singapore says ‘No’ to wearable devices for Covid-19 contact tracing” was created.
As of the time of writing, more than 8,000 people have already signed on the petition.
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The creator said that this device, and subsequent rules, could potentially turn Singapore into a police state:
All that is stopping the Singapore Government from becoming a surveillance state is the advent and mandating the compulsory usage of such a wearable device. What comes next would be laws that state these devices must not be turned off/remain on a person at all times – thus sealing our fate as a police state.
A police state: a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force which secretly supervises its citizens’ activities.
The petition says that the authorities’ announcement of the move as being “one for the greater good” and for “the safety and protection of all Singaporeans” is “false and baseless”.
An Infringement Of Our Rights
Covid-19, according to the petition, is simply the “perfect excuse” for the authorities to infringe upon Singaporeans’ “rights to privacy, personal space, and freedom of movement”.
It accuses the authorities of wanting to keep track of each and every citizens’ movements without repercussions.
“The Government looks to the Covid-19 pandemic as the perfect excuse to realise what it has always envisioned for us – this country’s populace: to surveil us with impunity, to track us without any technological inhibitions, and maintain a form of movement monitoring on each of us at all times and places.
“And to do so by decreeing it compulsory for all law-abiding persons to become ‘recipients’.”
Previously, for TraceTogether, the authorities have assured that data collected will only be kept for 21 days used for contact-tracing only with your authorisation.
if there were no ‘pings’, your data would be automatically deleted.
You can read more here.
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