Singapore finally deletes its COVID-era contact tracing data

Singapore's government announced on Monday it had deleted almost all the personal data collected from its COVID tracking systems – TraceTogether (TT) and SafeEntry (SE) – as of February 1. Almost. "Both the TT and SE (Business) App have been removed from the official mobile app stores, and the backend digital infrastructure …

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss the Safe Distancing Ambassadors :-)

[highdiver_2000]

Yeah, especially the ex air stewardesses

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking of the officious ones that gave me a lecture when I removed my mask briefly to take a sip of water on Sentosa on a hot day. In the open air, with no one within 10 meters.

Or the pairs in red goose-stepping around the malls.

Or scolded for not having a vacinated sticker at a hawker cos it had dropped off.

Or trying to tap with the app to enter a mall as an angry queue built up behind me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was moved on by a cop on a cycle for daring to stop 'exercising' to sit on a park bench to read a newspaper, despite being in the middle of the 800 acres of Hampstead Heath, half mile from the nearest road, 10 yards from the nearest path and with no one else in sight.

(it was Easter weekend, sunny and they were afraid of hordes of Londoners crowding the place)

[An_Old_Dog]

Exploitable Data

That whom-was-in-the-proximity-of-whom-else-and-when data is so valuable that I'm certain multiple somebodies have complete (undisclosed) backups of those data.

"Just in case," you know.

[Flightmode]

Re: Exploitable Data

Quoting a news article I’m sure will be coming in about six to eight months:

“We have reached out to the (country) authorities and will update this story with their response. Meanwhile, the press representative at (hyped LLM provider) provided this statement: ‘After careful investigations it is our conclusion that portions of this data was included, in anonymized format, in a set of training data used to train our model BEFORE the data was set to be deleted. Current training sets do not include sensitive or personally identifiable information in any way, shape or form’. When closing the call, they added, off the record, ‘No doubt we’ll speak again in a couple of weeks.’.”

[Khaptain]

A little bit if ETL and voila

Pull up your favourite ETL tool, point at a new, distant, far off in the cloud database, let it rip...

Delete the original data, claim that the original Covid data has now been completely deleted and that the original database no longer exists and that the world is safe again....

[renniks]

Singapore - the 1984-esque surveillance mad city-state