Bodily surveillance: Singapore’s COVID-19 app and technological opportunism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Singapore won early kudos for its ‘gold standard’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic back in February 2020. It was praised globally for its ability to activate an effective contact tracing system. Riding on this success, the government introduced ‘TraceTogether’, a mobile phone app to enhance contact tracing efforts, using a technology that leverages the Bluetooth feature on smartphones to track proximity between users and record their physical encounters. This paper contends that the roll-out of the app is a form of ‘technological opportunism’ to enhance greater bodily surveillance over its citizens during a time of crisis. The low number of downloads of the app initially (at 20%), before persuasion-coercion strategies were applied to lift the take-up rate to 90%, belies the assumption that surveillance is genuinely widely accepted. This paper details key responses to the app in Singapore, and the government’s decision to make it mandatory during the heart of the pandemic between 2020 to 2022. It considers the implications of technological opportunism, taking advantage of a pandemic to continue in the journey of turning citizens into what Michel Foucault would refer to as ‘subjectified bodies’ to be traced, tracked and codified.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it