Are good Singaporeans good?

WARNING: THIS IS AN OPINION PIECE. OPINIONNNNNN. It is not gonna be an intellectual ‘factual’ oho I am so smerrt piece. It’s gonna be what I think of what just happened.

Firstly omedetouu, omedetou (congrats!) for the first live stream of parliament in session for Singapore! The first live stream on 4 January 2021.

Technical wise, the camera angles were ok and at the beginning of it they did state they do not have a sign language interpreter however closed captioning would be available on the stream.

I was on the youtube version and somehow it didn’t appear to me, but no matter. Teething issues indeed since it’s the FIRST TIME EVAHH. Also there were very few seconds of black in the middle after 2 hours or so that I wonder if someone jostled a button or something but it was a mere 2 seconds of black and not a scary technical emergency.

I did notice the volume was peaking though but that will be so, so difficult on the technical crew side especially when every speaker speaks into the mic at a different distance and projects their voice at different volumes, not to forget the acrylic shield bounces the audio…

Which you know what, yeah. I was listening when the minister suddenly called upon the issue where Trace Together could be used for police investigations.

Hey, wait. Apakah? What was that? Cause firstly, I remembered the time when people had conspiracy theories about the Trace Together app and everything and it was reassured that we should use it because of this privacy statement.

Ok, my dudes. Firstly, for those who don’t know how Trace Together works and why I don’t worry is not because I’m ‘good’.

It’s because I believe in the lack of assets and memory space and incompetency.

Trace Together is basically a Nintendo Street Pass feature. You can only tag people via the signal. You can’t know where you met them.

It’s a literal high five of knowing you were within the signal of this person at this specific time but… where were they?

Seriously.

I couldn’t tell who or where the people were when streetpass had this feature, it was just fishing for people for points back then so your avatar could get stuff.

Trace Together is the same thing only this time we’re trying not to fish for Covid-19.

It comes with a token version too and basically. If you don’t have the app, a token works too to make sure the ‘signal’ works if you don’t have a phone.

Fun fact, I think it gives us a double data if you bring both out. Which means, if you really are in contact with a Covid-19 person or place, then you will be contacted as this is like a “Oh, let’s check out the data for this ORIGINAL person who got it, who did THEY come into contact with?”

Only at a more frustrating pace for the contact tracers since you can’t contact everyone who just happened to go past a person for 5 seconds and ping-ed their thing.

Which is also why you get the “possible exposure” thing more due to your SAFEENTRY check in and outs. Sheesh, y’all.

What pisses people off is that it was supposed to be only used for Covid-19 tracing, not the popo investigations.

With the way it was announced, it made people think CONSPIRACY and MOVING GOAL POST.

And let’s face it, we hate moving goal posts.

“You don’t need to be afraid if you’re not doing anything bad!”

Yeah, shut up. I’m not afraid, I’m more pissed off.

Do you know how much work the developers had to do within a short period of time and keep updating their app to help actual contact tracers to make sure we don’t have an unknown outbreak out of nowhere?

Behind every campaign or initiative, there will be a bunch of people arrowed to do things and there will always be either the useless ones or the people who are trying to cover and make things efficient.

And this is a conjecture but I’m going HMMMM that the team would have just the capacity to make the simplest version that is able to work on various phones and that’s already difficult.

(Hua*ei phones, I see you. So far I noticed out of all the brands, that phone’s battery is being sucked by the app badly.)

These developers probably had to work in a crunch time to get it out and then combined with conspiracies and trying to have people install the app was difficult.

Now with this new announcement, people are going to delete their apps because thanks, if it was tabled that it can be part of investigations, what else huh, WHAT ELSE? Is what people are thinking.

So if you’re good you won’t have to worry. But how much percentage of good people do we have in Singapore, is what I want to know.

And how much is the percentage of people who are pissed off by moving goal posts or are now feeling justified that “IT IS A CONSPIRACY, IT IS GONNA TRACK USSSSS”.

What’s the balance, hmmmmmm?

Did the whole announcement just undo months of ‘campaign’ work?

Or is it a c’est la vie gamble cause we’re now in Phase 3 and that TT is still needed to gain entry in some places while SafeEntry is definitely needed in major locations.

Also, the only way TraceTogether is gonna be used by the cops is mostly in the court evidence part.

In my opinion as a Phoenix Wright player.

Yes, as a game player.

Look, if you aren’t a developer or an investigator and are making all these conjectures, I too can do it, non?

This is what I IMAGINE.

If you can’t use TraceTogether to actually track people by pin pointing them, you can mostly use it as an additional evidence to say “Hey, this person’s TT states he was here” so you have to catch them first before this can be used in part of the investigations.

It’s not going to be a magic device that let’s people track immediately, come on.

Watch CrimeWatch, my dudes. They have other techniques.

Also cause they’d use every other method first to catch a person because do you know red tape?

Do you know how tired staff are and how to get data and emails?

Do you know how much of a little bitch inter-department relations can be?

It won’t be instant and if there’s an easier/faster/more proven way to be used in investigations, I would think that would be done.

Whatever it is, I won’t be shocked if there’s going to be different Key Point Indicators after this whole announcement.

Also hello if you’re still reading this stan Loona.