SINGAPORE: There is a growing international consensus that digital regulations are needed to build trust, so people and businesses can have a sense of confidence in the digital domain, said Josephine Teo, Minister for Communications and Information, on Wednesday December 1 at a work trip to London, where the Singapore Government signed three Memorandums of Understanding MOUs with the UK. The MOUs are in the areas of digital trade facilitation, digital identities and cybersecurity.
There are regulations to make sure there is safety in every aspect of daily life, according to Mrs Teo.
The same is true in the digital domain. People, citizens of every country, will expect that someone is regulating the delivery of digital services to make sure they don't do individuals as well as society harm, she said.
The new regulations are intended to recognize the need to protect users from online threats, at least at the beginning of the design process. There has been an erosion of trust in how digital technologies can be applied, according to Mrs Teo. She said digital regulations are very important in order to build trust.
In response to questions about whether the Government plans to clamp down on Facebook, Mrs Teo said Singapore adopted a collaborative approach that We'd like to bring them into the conversation. We'd like to involve them in designing the solutions for them. That's going to be the approach we take. She said that it does not mean that when regulations are needed, we won't go ahead with them.
But we would want to engage with all the companies, including the tech giants, in designing interventions, whether it's laws or updating our codes of practices. She said that participants were interested in the fact that the POFMA Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act has been invoked several times to address misinformation related to COVID 19, such as falsehoods about vaccines, and that digital technologies have helped Singapore combat the spread of COVID 19, and that it isn't used against them.
She added that participants from other countries were interested in the TraceTogether app.
I shared that people were able to trust it enough to use it every day to perform check-ins. The number of check-ins tracked on TraceTogether and SafeEntry exceeds 10 million every day, it amazed other participants. She said that's something that's quite interesting to them.
They were very curious about Singaporeans acceptance of a tracking device, like what technology we used in order to give people the assurance that it is not a Big Brother watching them. When asked by reporters whether a law like POFMA is in opposition with the Government's light touch to regulations, Mrs Teo said there must always be balance.
She said that a law like POFMA says our society value truthfulness in public discourse, we can disagree with others, but they have to be grounded in facts. She said that we have a problem if public discourse is based on falsehoods.
Does it mean that each of us has to be constrained in some way as a result of upholding this value? The answer is yes. I think participation in the online space has not been reduced even after POFMA has been implemented and put into effect. It has gone up only once. She added that when it comes to regulations, it is a fine balance. It is about doing things not too late, not too early. We can't approach it believing that we will get every piece of intervention right the first time because we don't rely only on rules and regulations and laws.
We must have the courage to stay the course if we think that what we're doing is actually producing the results. There is a lot of judgment involved in the need for balance, according to Mrs Teo.
The judgment has to be based on our understanding of the technology and an objective assessment of the impact on individuals and society.