HANDLING OF TRACETOGETHER
In his speech, Mr Singh also returned to the privacy concerns surrounding contact tracing app TraceTogether.
“During COVID-19, the public was belatedly informed by a minister in this House that his senior Cabinet colleagues were aware by October 2020 that previous government assurances on TraceTogether being solely used for contact tracing were effectively false statements of fact,” said the WP chief.
“Misrepresentations” on the matter were made by the government even before October 2020, and they “stood uncorrected for months”, he added.
On Jun 5, 2020, Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said in parliament that TraceTogether would strictly be used for contact tracing. He reiterated this point a few days later.
On Jan 5, 2021, Dr Balakrishnan, who was also the Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative, clarified in parliament that while the police can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations, they can only do so by requiring a person involved in the investigation to produce his token or mobile phone.
The issue of the police being able to obtain such information emerged in parliament two days earlier, when then Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan told the House that under Section 20 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the police have the power to order anyone to produce any data, including TraceTogether data, for the purposes of a criminal investigation.
This raised privacy concerns over the national contact tracing tool for COVID-19.
“The PAP government took almost nine months before it disclosed to Singaporeans that the Singapore Police Force sought to collect TraceTogether data for an investigation in May 2020, even as the PAP continued to assert right through the rest of the year that TraceTogether was only to be used for contact tracing,” said Mr Singh.
Responding to Mr Singh in parliament on Wednesday, Dr Balakrishnan said he takes responsibility for what happened since he was in charge of the programme.
A member of the public asked him about the matter at the end of October, and he spent November checking on the matter, he added.
The question was put to Mr Desmond Tan in December, and parliament next sat in January, where it was answered, said Dr Balakrishnan.
The government then got a certificate of urgency to expedite changes to the legislation in February. “I don’t think I delayed or obfuscated, and at all times, I’ve always been upfront and clean,” he added.
“I have been here long enough. People know the way I operate. So that’s why I am objecting to your insinuation that there’s any undue delay or any attempt at obfuscation or lack of transparency, that’s not the way we do it.”
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