SINGAPORE – This wealthy financial centre is known world-wide for its tidy streets and tight controls on personal behaviour, including famous restrictions on the sale of chewing gum to keep the city clean.
Now Singapore may soon be known for something else: the most extensive effort to collect data on daily living ever attempted in a city.
As part of its Smart Nation programme, launched by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in late 2014, Singapore is deploying an undetermined number of sensors and cameras across the island city-state that will allow the government to monitor everything from the cleanliness of public spaces to the density of crowds and the precise movement of every locally registered vehicle.
It is a sweeping effort that will likely touch the lives of every single resident in the country, in ways that aren’t completely clear since many potential applications may not be known until the system is fully implemented. Already, for instance, authorities are developing or using systems that can tell when people are smoking in prohibited zones or littering from high-rise housing. But the data collected in this next phase-and how it’s used-will go far beyond that.
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