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Singapore Built a Coronavirus App, but It Hasn’t Worked So Far
The city-state’s experience in digital contact-tracing holds lessons for other countries, including an Apple-Google effort in the U.S.
SINGAPORE—As governments around the world race to roll out contact-tracing phone apps to fight the coronavirus pandemic, an early experiment in Singapore faces a big hurdle: getting people to sign up.
The government-developed app, called TraceTogether, is designed to help authorities identify people with whom a coronavirus patient has been in close contact. Those people, if found quickly, could be isolated before they pass the virus on to others, breaking the chain of transmission.
But for the technology to be effective, three-quarters of the city-state’s 5.7 million residents must have the app on their smartphones, officials have said. A month after its launch, Singapore is far from that target. As of last week, TraceTogether had 1.08 million users, a government spokeswoman said.
That means although the app is being used, it isn’t moving the needle on Singapore’s contact-tracing operations that have grown more onerous in recent weeks as case counts have risen. Singapore has reported more than 10,100 infections, up from 385 when the app was launched on March 20.
The experience of wealthy, tech-savvy Singapore is a cautionary tale for companies and governments around the world that are looking toward smartphone apps to slow the spread.
Among the most high-profile initiatives is one by U.S. tech giants Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Their tool, expected to be launched in May, would alert users if they had been in close contact with a person who is later confirmed to have the disease.
Australia, New Zealand and countries in Europe are also exploring similar apps as they seek to prevent a resurgence of cases after lockdowns are eased.
But if Singapore—a small place where the level of trust in the government is relatively high—struggled to draw the numbers, other countries are likely to face equal or more resistance, said Natalie Pang, a communications professor at the National University of Singapore.
Privacy is one of the major concerns, she said, while some Singaporeans also say the app isn’t necessary when most of the city is under an effective lockdown.
When Singapore’s app was launched, lawmakers urged residents to download it to help save lives. Anyone with a Singapore mobile-phone number could activate it. Many residents jumped aboard and by April 1, there were nearly one million downloads.
Then, the numbers started to plateau. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in an address Tuesday appealed to residents to install the app, saying any privacy concerns needed to be weighed against the benefits of easing the city’s tight restrictions on movement and staying open after that.
Yeo Kai Wen, a 30-year-old freelance photographer who didn’t download the app, said he wasn’t entirely persuaded by government assurances that data was secure. “I have no idea what kind of data is being taken away from me,” he said.
Mr. Yeo’s concerns reflect the widespread suspicion that increasingly accompanies technological innovations. Government surveillance has expanded in recent years and the collection and handling of personal data by tech giants has sparked controversy.
Singapore’s app and the Silicon Valley project are based on the same technological setup. They sidestep the use of location data and instead rely on a phone’s Bluetooth function to pick up the presence of other phones around them. Individual phones then exchange anonymized digital identities to record such interactions. That data is stored on individual devices and users can opt out anytime.
In Singapore, when a person using the app tests positive, contact tracers seek the patient’s permission to extract the data from their phones. Health authorities have a digital key to retrieve the phone numbers of close contacts. Contact tracers then call the numbers to alert users about their possible exposure to the virus.
Australia and New Zealand are exploring similar models, while France and Germany are looking into a central system to track which phones were in contact with an infected person’s and then send out alerts. More than 50 governments have expressed interest in learning about Singapore’s app and the city-state has open-sourced the code.
Apple and Google are pushing for interaction data to be handled in a more decentralized way. In the system they are creating, governments can build apps on top of the tech giants’ software that will notify people exposed to an infected person without identifying those potentially infected individuals to health authorities. After the apps notify their users of exposure, they can encourage users to identify themselves for testing—and to help contact tracers.
In Singapore, government engineers made their case for sharing data with authorities in an online paper breaking down their app’s technical design and use.
The definition of a close encounter, they said, would differ depending on the nature of the interaction between two people and the environment in which it occurred. For instance, the time spent with an infected person for the encounter to count as a close one would be shorter if the two were in an enclosed area without fresh ventilation.
Having a human contact-tracer sift through the data was essential to prevent people without significant or relevant exposure from being alerted, they wrote.
For now, TraceTogether’s limitations have shown the importance of human contact-tracers, whose ranks have grown larger in Singapore.
Authorities and experts say technology, while potentially helpful, shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for the essential if tedious containment work done through traditional methods, including detailed interviews with sickened people. U.S. health advisers have urged states and cities to build up these teams as they emerge from lockdowns.
In an April 11 blog post, Jason Bay, the product lead for TraceTogether and a senior director at Singapore’s government technology agency, cautioned against construing automated contact-tracing as a coronavirus panacea.
“Any attempt to believe otherwise, is an exercise in hubris, and technology triumphalism,” he said.
—Sam Schechner in Paris and Rachel Pannett in Sydney contributed to this article.
Write to Liza Lin at [email protected] and Chong Koh Ping at [email protected]
The city-state’s experience in digital contact-tracing holds lessons for other countries, including an Apple-Google effort in the U.S.
SINGAPORE—As governments around the world race to roll out contact-tracing phone apps to fight the coronavirus pandemic, an early experiment in Singapore faces a big hurdle: getting people to sign up.
The government-developed app, called TraceTogether, is designed to help authorities identify people with whom a coronavirus patient has been in close contact. Those people, if found quickly, could be isolated before they pass the virus on to others, breaking the chain of transmission.
But for the technology to be effective, three-quarters of the city-state’s 5.7 million residents must have the app on their smartphones, officials have said. A month after its launch, Singapore is far from that target. As of last week, TraceTogether had 1.08 million users, a government spokeswoman said.
That means although the app is being used, it isn’t moving the needle on Singapore’s contact-tracing operations that have grown more onerous in recent weeks as case counts have risen. Singapore has reported more than 10,100 infections, up from 385 when the app was launched on March 20.
The experience of wealthy, tech-savvy Singapore is a cautionary tale for companies and governments around the world that are looking toward smartphone apps to slow the spread.
Among the most high-profile initiatives is one by U.S. tech giants Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Their tool, expected to be launched in May, would alert users if they had been in close contact with a person who is later confirmed to have the disease.
Australia, New Zealand and countries in Europe are also exploring similar apps as they seek to prevent a resurgence of cases after lockdowns are eased.
But if Singapore—a small place where the level of trust in the government is relatively high—struggled to draw the numbers, other countries are likely to face equal or more resistance, said Natalie Pang, a communications professor at the National University of Singapore.
Privacy is one of the major concerns, she said, while some Singaporeans also say the app isn’t necessary when most of the city is under an effective lockdown.
When Singapore’s app was launched, lawmakers urged residents to download it to help save lives. Anyone with a Singapore mobile-phone number could activate it. Many residents jumped aboard and by April 1, there were nearly one million downloads.
Then, the numbers started to plateau. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in an address Tuesday appealed to residents to install the app, saying any privacy concerns needed to be weighed against the benefits of easing the city’s tight restrictions on movement and staying open after that.
Yeo Kai Wen, a 30-year-old freelance photographer who didn’t download the app, said he wasn’t entirely persuaded by government assurances that data was secure. “I have no idea what kind of data is being taken away from me,” he said.
Mr. Yeo’s concerns reflect the widespread suspicion that increasingly accompanies technological innovations. Government surveillance has expanded in recent years and the collection and handling of personal data by tech giants has sparked controversy.
Singapore’s app and the Silicon Valley project are based on the same technological setup. They sidestep the use of location data and instead rely on a phone’s Bluetooth function to pick up the presence of other phones around them. Individual phones then exchange anonymized digital identities to record such interactions. That data is stored on individual devices and users can opt out anytime.
In Singapore, when a person using the app tests positive, contact tracers seek the patient’s permission to extract the data from their phones. Health authorities have a digital key to retrieve the phone numbers of close contacts. Contact tracers then call the numbers to alert users about their possible exposure to the virus.
Australia and New Zealand are exploring similar models, while France and Germany are looking into a central system to track which phones were in contact with an infected person’s and then send out alerts. More than 50 governments have expressed interest in learning about Singapore’s app and the city-state has open-sourced the code.
Apple and Google are pushing for interaction data to be handled in a more decentralized way. In the system they are creating, governments can build apps on top of the tech giants’ software that will notify people exposed to an infected person without identifying those potentially infected individuals to health authorities. After the apps notify their users of exposure, they can encourage users to identify themselves for testing—and to help contact tracers.
In Singapore, government engineers made their case for sharing data with authorities in an online paper breaking down their app’s technical design and use.
The definition of a close encounter, they said, would differ depending on the nature of the interaction between two people and the environment in which it occurred. For instance, the time spent with an infected person for the encounter to count as a close one would be shorter if the two were in an enclosed area without fresh ventilation.
Having a human contact-tracer sift through the data was essential to prevent people without significant or relevant exposure from being alerted, they wrote.
For now, TraceTogether’s limitations have shown the importance of human contact-tracers, whose ranks have grown larger in Singapore.
Authorities and experts say technology, while potentially helpful, shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for the essential if tedious containment work done through traditional methods, including detailed interviews with sickened people. U.S. health advisers have urged states and cities to build up these teams as they emerge from lockdowns.
In an April 11 blog post, Jason Bay, the product lead for TraceTogether and a senior director at Singapore’s government technology agency, cautioned against construing automated contact-tracing as a coronavirus panacea.
“Any attempt to believe otherwise, is an exercise in hubris, and technology triumphalism,” he said.
—Sam Schechner in Paris and Rachel Pannett in Sydney contributed to this article.
Write to Liza Lin at [email protected] and Chong Koh Ping at [email protected]
