Some Singaporeans believe TraceTogether is here for the long haul

Singapore— TraceTogether may be around for a long time, said some netizens in a discussion on Reddit as to what would be the longest-lasting measures of the Covid-19 pandemic,

In a Reddit thread entitled “Can you put with another year of this COVID measures?” poster u/nyvrem asked people how their mental health is holding up.

They added that in other countries such as the United States, New Zealand and Australia, life is “going back to near normal”.

“See already damn emo man =(“

Can you put with another year of this COVID measures? from singapore

Commenters on the thread talked about the long-reaching measures of the pandemic, with some saying that mask-wearing will be around for a very long time, possibly years, to come.

But others quickly brought up the contact tracing platform TraceTogether, whose implementation has not been without controversy, as privacy issues have been brought up.

On Jan 4 this year, Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan said in Parliament that the Singapore Police Force (SPF) is empowered under the CPC to obtain data for criminal investigations from TraceTogether.

This contradicted what was said by Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative and Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Vivian Balaksrishnan in June 2020: “TraceTogether app, TraceTogether running on a device, and the data generated, is purely for contact-tracing. Period.”

A commenter wrote on the Reddit post that they “seriously believe the government will try to push TT as something that we should have at all times and I’m not sure if there would be pushback.”

Others seemed to agree.

But at least one Redditor disagreed, writing that TraceTogether would be hard to sustain.

/TISG

Read also: PM Lee says Gov’t mistaken in not being upfront with TraceTogether

PM Lee says Gov’t mistaken in not being upfront with TraceTogether