Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

channelnewsasia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#61

Post by NhanH »

slg wrote: post #57
malka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot compare individual, and abstract entities such as states. Humans feel empathy. States (and corporations) only follow interests.

>Humans feel empathy. States (and corporations) only follow interests. This is such a bizarre statement to me. States and corporations are made of people. For the states and corporations to lack empathy it means the people controlling them are lacking empathy.

States and corporations have incentives/ goals (which is actually independent from any single human inside the organization). The incentives then got turn into smaller incentives for the human that they are made of. For states and corporations to have empathy, the empathy of the human inside will need to be stronger than their incentives. This is a lot different than a single human only need empathy to not do bad things.

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#62

Post by sverhagen »

malka wrote: post #48
postingpals wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is trusting corporations, who also give your data to the government. Who do you trust with power then?

Me. My wife.

It seems exceptional to me to have relatives with the exact same hygiene on data protection. In my experience it's often yet another party I'm forced to give "my" (our) data to. Who then give it to corporations again, and so on. But I certainly respect that everyone could have different experiences in this area.

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#63

Post by coldtea »

kasperni wrote: post #51
coldtea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised. Where do you leave that's not a surveillance state?

Nordic country. And my point was mainly targeted on "will the government use the data for other non-intended purposes". Instead of whether or not my Internet traffic is monitored by some state actor.

>Nordic country

Nine Eyes:

The Nine Eyes is a different arrangement that consists of the same members of Five Eyes working with Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway.

Fourteen Eyes:

According to a document leaked by Edward Snowden, there is another working agreement amongst 14 nations officially known as SIGINT Seniors Europe, or "SSEUR". These "14 Eyes" consist of the same members of Nine Eyes plus Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.

>will the government use the data for other non-intended purposes

I wouldn't bet on it. I think that nordic cultures (especially Sweden) have the tendency to think the government does no wrong, has no power plays and special interests, and only ever does what it says it does.

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#64

Post by michaelt »

kbar13 wrote: post #25
f6v wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never been to Singapore, but if there’s really low crime rate and people don’t litter on the streets - I’d call that progress.

i dont understand this focus on litter on the streets. yes clean streets is wonderful but i dont rank it anywhere near freedom of speech and social equality or something like standardized healthcare in importance. my hunch is that "clean streets" is mostly important to those who are not sensitive to social injustice...

If you start from the proposition that the state implements the will of the people and the state's laws are just and true, then a strong state is a just state.

After all, if you can't enforce anti-littering laws, how can you hope to enforce anti-discrimination laws? To be effective at convert the law's promises into reality is a good thing, if the laws are a good thing.

Of course, I don't accept the proposition and I don't think anyone else does either - otherwise lawmakers would all have retired because their work was done.

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#65

Post by cageface »

coldtea wrote: post #45
kmlx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

true, but he did "create" an extraordinary city state.

If it wasn't convenient for many players (from western to asian neighbors) to have a neutral tax-haven state in the area, it would have ended up like any small Asian/African/Latin American state.

I think of it as the Switzerland of Asia.

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#66

Post by verroq »

gonehome wrote: post #56

One thing that drives me crazy about this is that Apple and Google partnered to come up with a brilliant Bluetooth solution to contact tracing right at the beginning of the pandemic. It was privacy first, well designed, and it works. It was hamstrung by being opt-in instead of opt-out, relying on state level cooperation and misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN)…

Google and Apple will happily deliver all your information to the government when it becomes their legal obligation.

Are we so naive to believe that if only we adopted their “privacy conscious” solution, there won’t be less privacy focused solutions preferred by the government? Or that their solution won’t be forced to change to meet their legal requirements?

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#67

Post by gonehome »

verroq wrote: post #66
gonehome wrote: post #56

One thing that drives me crazy about this is that Apple and Google partnered to come up with a brilliant Bluetooth solution to contact tracing right at the beginning of the pandemic. It was privacy first, well designed, and it works. It was hamstrung by being opt-in instead of opt-out, relying on state level cooperation and misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN)…

Google and Apple will happily deliver all your information to the government when it becomes their legal obligation. Are we so naive to believe that if only we adopted their “privacy conscious” solution, there won’t be less privacy focused solutions preferred by the government? Or that their solution won’t be forced to change to meet their legal requirements?

> “ misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN).”

Your comment is case-in-point the kind of knee-jerk response that I was talking about.

Edit: You added the second part after I’d already responded. They developed a good model to do large scale contact tracing in a privacy conscious way. People rejected this with vague suggestions like your comment about how it could be changed to be the opposite of what they’ve developed. Most people didn’t understand how it worked at all or why the design was good.

As a result, worse less-privacy preserving methods are used.

Re: Singapore says contact tracing data may be used for criminal investigations

#70

Post by kypro »

gonehome wrote: post #56

One thing that drives me crazy about this is that Apple and Google partnered to come up with a brilliant Bluetooth solution to contact tracing right at the beginning of the pandemic. It was privacy first, well designed, and it works. It was hamstrung by being opt-in instead of opt-out, relying on state level cooperation and misunderstood by people who didn’t even attempt to try to understand it (including here on HN)…

I personally refuse to use any contact tracing because an envitible consequence of its adoption is the idea that mass surveillance is legitimate so long as it can be argued it's keeping people safe.

Tech like this is always abused by governments. Just look at how governments are attacking encrypted messaging services today. It would be naive to think same thing wouldn't happen for any popular privacy-first contact tracing app.

Post reply on HN