On September 21 2023, CAIDG Research Associate Sharanya Shanmugam joined a panel session in the ‘Beyond Data Protection Conference: Information and Protection against Risks of the Digital Society’. She presented a working paper titled ‘Comparing Smart City Data Protection Approaches: Digital Consent and the Accountability Framework in Singapore’, co-authored with Research Associate Wenxi Zhang and Centre Director Jason Grant Allen. The event was hosted by Utrecht University and organised under the auspices of the INFO-LEG project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
The working paper explores the merits and limitations of the consent approach and the accountability framework for data protection.
Key insights from the presentation:
• Consent should be knowing and voluntary. If these 2 conditions are not fulfilled, the extension of consent can bring harm to the data subject instead.
• There is increased difficulty in obtaining meaningful consent in smart cities where consent is absent by design: data subjects cannot “opt-out” of data collection in public spaces.
• Due to such shortcomings, we observe a shift away from the consent model in Singapore and towards increased accountability placed on data-holding organisations. We argue that this approach has higher legitimacy in jurisdictions like Singapore where citizens have high trust for Government agencies.
• However, the exceptions to consent obligation (https://smu.sg/7iaq) in the 2021 amendment to the PDPA and the absence of legally-enforceable requirements for privacy policies to be understandable suggests a potential prioritisation of business needs over citizen interests.
We propose to enhance the hybrid model of the PDPA in Singapore by:
Enhancing Accountability
• Striking a better balance between community vs corporate interests
• Increased citizen engagement in the design and implementation of protection regimes
Enhancing the consent framework
• Foreground consent to when choice is infrequent, when the resulting potential harms are easy to imagine, and where there are incentives to choose seriously. (Richards and Hartzog)
• User-friendly consent prototypes to offer data subjects more control and autonomy
In the panel session, Sharanya was also joined by esteemed researchers Bárbara Lazarotto, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, Sarah Eskens, and Veronika Nagy. The panel presentations were followed by a vibrant and fruitful discussion on ways to protect the safety and privacy of citizens in the face of increasing surveillance and data collection in smart cities.
The authors are grateful for the helpful feedback received during the panel session and look forward to revising their working paper in the upcoming months.
Access the working paper here: https://smu.sg/gzno
Last updated on 24 Nov 2023 .