Recently, the Singapore govt used the TraceTogether data from the COVID tracing app to assist in solving a criminal case.

And suddenly, everyone was concerned about the govt “spying” on them. Many posts were written on both sides – for and against. Personally I don’t see what the issue is – the govt used it to bring a criminal to justice, not like it’s using that data to see what you have been up to. Besides, the amount of info that effort gathered is so minimal – GPS location, time, and other device IDs that your device was less than 10m to (Bluetooth tech).

What people don’t realise is that they are leaking much more data to the Internet than they know. Posting a pic on Instagram, tagging your friends, and geo-tagging it (or tagging a restaurant/resort etc), immediately exposes more info to Instagram (which is a private company, not govt) and you have zero control how they use that info. Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, you know they’ll use it for ads and other “personalization” uses.