By Abhisvara Sinha (MPA ’23)

It’s 2021, yet Singapore’s use of smart city technologies has its average citizen living like it’s 2040. A quick message to the government’s social media-enabled chatbot, Bus Uncle, pulls analysis of sensor data from the city’s buses to give you an update on when your next bus is arriving, how crowded the bus is, and an added joke in Singlish to lighten up your day. Using the government’s Bluetooth-enabled TraceTogether app, you can check in at your favorite lunch spot, showing your digital COVID-19 vaccination card to the server at the entrance. Your anonymized Bluetooth ping flows into the government’s central data pool where nearby Bluetooth pings are collected as anonymized encrypted trades to identify potential COVID-19 clusters, suggest crowd-control measures, and notify you of potential exposures.

TraceTogether collects user data to identify COVID-19 clusters and notify individuals about potential exposure.

No one can deny that the citizen experience is seamless. In fact, 85% of citizens claimed to be satisfied with the government’s digital services in 2020. According to a 2021 Smart City report from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), Singapore ranked as the world’s smartest city for the third year in a row, broadly defined as an urban area that has become more efficient, environmentally friendly, and/or socially inclusive through digital technologies. The benefits of smart cities cannot be overlooked, with reports suggesting that smart cities can improve key quality of life indicators such as daily commute, health issues, or crime by 10 to 30%.

85% of Singaporean citizens claimed to be satisfied with the government’s digital services in 2020 (Source: Smart Nation and Digital Government Office)

But when does a government go too far? Is there a point after which citizens will refuse to sacrifice their personal data to improve government services?

In Singapore, the threshold is relatively high. A paternalistic and successful government legacy has led citizens to be extremely trusting of the government. According to IMD’s 2021 Smart City survey, 67.3% of Singaporeans were willing to give up personal data in order to improve traffic, and 73% were comfortable with the even more controversial strategy of using facial recognition technology to lower crime.

During the peak of the pandemic, technology was key to Singapore’s highly effective contact tracing efforts. However, I remember my British friends remaining silent in disbelief when I described the mandatory check-in procedure at public spaces tied to our unique national identity numbers. I rationalized that it was a crisis; I was willing to sacrifice my personal data to secure the public health of the greater community.

However, even in Singapore, suspicion of the government’s use of data has begun to rise. In January 2021, tensions bubbled up when the Minister for Home Affairs revealed during a parliamentary session that data from the TraceTogether app had been used in a murder investigation, a revelation in stark contrast to the government’s previous assurance that the app’s data would be used exclusively for contact tracing and could only be decrypted by the Ministry of Health. Met with outrage from the opposition party and citizens moving to boycott the app, the government passed a law shortly after explicitly outlining seven “exceptional” criminal offences — including terrorism, murder, kidnapping, rape, and drug trafficking — under which the police can access TraceTogether data.

Some might argue that, ultimately, this could benefit citizens: isn’t more precise crime management the best route to a safer city? While perhaps effective today, the use of personal data for crime management sets a particularly risky precedent particularly for Singapore’s extremely strict criminal justice system, where offenses such as vandalism can be punished with caning and a $2,000 fine or imprisonment for up to three years. Further, the technology can exacerbate over-policing of ethnic minority communities, like Malay and Indian Singaporeans who are already overrepresented in Singapore’s prison population.

With smart cities at the top of the policy agenda for leading cities across the globe, governments need to ensure that technology engenders, instead of eroding, citizen trust in government. To this end, transparency will be key. Governments need to provide comprehensive and frequent public reporting on the core components of their algorithms, what data is being used, and who has access to sources of data to ensure citizens can hold their elected officials accountable.

While I enjoy a good Bus Uncle joke as much as the next person, a feeling of uneasiness has creeped in for the next time I open my TraceTogether app. By the time we reach our “post-pandemic” reality, how much will governments know about us through our personal data? And to what extent will we be willing and informed participants in the pursuit of living in a smart city?

Abhisvara Sinha is a contributing editor for The Morningside Post and a first-year Master of Public Administration candidate specializing in Urban Policy and Data & Quantitative Analysis at SIPA.

POLITICS: Navigating smart cities: perspectives from the Singaporean experiment