In case people forget that Singapore鈥檚 a highly advanced surveillance state with next to no citizen privacy, in comes this GovTech project that聽seeks to install 鈥榮mart鈥 lampposts across the country to monitor absolutely everything that鈥檚聽happening on the streets.
reported that lamp posts in the one-north and Geylang districts will be turned into smarter devices that can collect and transmit environmental, crowd, and vehicular data to government agencies, aside from聽their standard purpose of providing illumination. It鈥檚 all for the greater good, according to GovTech, as the data can be used for better urban planning and quicker responses to any situation.
Enforcement against errant personal mobility devices (PMDs) will easier too, as camera and artificial intelligence-based video analytics systems can determine if riders are traveling over the legal speed limit on footpaths (15kmh). 鈥淭he data will be captured and an alert will be sent to the relevant agency,鈥 wrote The Sunday Times.
Smart? Yes. Too smart? Most probably. After all, the smart lamp posts boast facial detection tech powerful enough to index faces to 鈥渄etermine gender, race, and age鈥 and even carry out facial matching against databases. That鈥檚 a serious concern for privacy matters in an already highly monitored nation.
This unconstrained access to our personal data and our activities will go nationwide 鈥 the government is looking to expand the smart lamppost project across the island with more than 100,000 lamp posts.
With privacy being a growing concern worldwide in light of Facebook鈥檚 massive Cambridge Analytica scandal,聽Singaporeans should be disturbed about yet another聽panopticon.聽Of course, folks can argue that the Singapore government won鈥檛 abuse their power over our personal data, but (a) security breaches are entirely possible and (b) who watches the watchmen?
