Why Singapore is on the cusp of becoming a big data utopia

The Singapore government has begun building its own Skynet. No, not the killer AI that wrecked havoc on humankind in The Terminator, but an eye in the sky which will know in real-time where all the cars are in the country, round-the-clock.

The reason for that, at least on the surface, is mundane: it wants to improve traffic by charging drivers for using congested roads. Singapore’s existing Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system uses physical gantries that charges drivers for going past it. But it has been criticized for being ineffective.

A new version of the ERP will use satellite positioning technology to pinpoint the exact location of a vehicle, find out its distance traveled along a congested road, and charge users according to that. Its development is well underway. The government conducted a trial and found it feasible, and three companies are vying for the contract to develop it.

Now here’s the kicker: we can expect nearly all Singapore-registered vehicles to come under the new ERP, just as they are under the present one.

Think of the amount of data it would own. There are almost a million vehicles in Singapore now, packed into a landmass slightly smaller than New York City.

And the government won’t just possess location data. It could potentially enable digital payments for parking fees, which means it can learn about spending habits too.

Let’s leave aside the debate of whether a satellite system would be effective. Think instead about the technical feat of capturing and storing the data, slicing and dicing it, and presenting it in a way that humans can comprehend. Think about how the data can be used.

Laying the groundwork

The government already knows a lot about its citizens. With each nine-character-long personal ID, it can retrieve data like income, job history, health status, criminal record, and travel history. And consider the fact that many services, including telcos, ask for people’s identification cards before engaging them. That means the government, if it wants, can build a snapshot of a person that’s more exhaustive than what Google or Facebook can dream of.

Its omnipresence is growing. Here’s a look at how government entities and corporations are wiring up the island:

• The Singapore Police launched a drive to install CCTVs islandwide in housing estates and parking spaces.
• Singapore’s largest telco SingTel, majority-owned by a Singapore sovereign wealth fund, has invested millions into smart surveillance technology which can recognize facial features. Faces can potentially be matched with identities.
• Singapore is building up its big data analysis capabilities. It began training more data scientists in Singapore to take advantage of commercial and government datasets.
• Singapore has attracted foreign big data companies to step up in the country (Palantir and Spire). It is encouraging the growth of homegrown internet startups.

The motives for these initiatives are no doubt commercial and public policy driven. With more insight into human behavior, government bodies and commercial enterprises can make better decisions that could improve public well-being or boost profit.

But there’s an opaque side to all this. How precisely will the information be used, especially when data privacy regulations on government bodies are non-existent, and when current laws give the state broad powers to retrieve data? And while laws are in place to prevent profit-making entities from abusing data, government bodies still have full authority to obtain commercial data for “security” or “investigative” purposes.

Government officials can pay lip service to data protection all they want. But without legal safeguards, the risk of empty talk grows larger.