How to Balance Governance Efficiency and Privacy Protection? A Textual Analysis of the Privacy Policies of the COVID-19 Contact-Tracing App in China and Singapore

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned the spread of contact-tracing applications such as China's "Health Code" and Singapore's "TraceTogether." Balancing efficiency and privacy ethics in data governance has become a common problem faced by all countries using digital tracing tools to control the pandemic. The laws of both China and Singapore stipulate that prior to collecting personal information, organizations and institutions must clearly inform individuals about the types of personal information collected and the rules for the use of personal information, and must obtain authorized user consent. This article analyzes the privacy policies of Health Code in China and TraceTogether in Singapore and identifies five potential problems in Health Code's privacy policies the broad collection of personal information, multiple processing purposes, indeterminate storage time, ambiguous privacy policy content, and the ineffectiveness of informed consent, although Health Code has been deemed an efficient tool to fight against the pandemic. Singapore's TraceTogether adheres to the principles of minimum information collection, limited information processing purposes, minimum duration of information storage, openness and transparency of privacy policies, and informed consent. These two models for using big data in the fight against the pandemic in China and Singapore suggest that data governance needs to reconcile public interests and individual rights, and should balance governance efficiency and data ethics.