This is with regard to the recent disclosure in Parliament that data from the contact-tracing application TraceTogether can be and has been used for law enforcement purposes (“TraceTogether data use by police ‘restricted to very serious offences’, says Shanmugam”; Jan 5).

I am afraid that I am not the only one to have found the ministerial efforts to be quite feeble and less mollifying than intended when it came to addressing the entirely foreseeable backlash.

In particular, I found it hard to reconcile Dr Vivian Balakrishnan’s declaration that the Government “(does) not take the trust of Singaporeans lightly” with other elements of his clarification delivered in Parliament.

It is, of course, not unusual to misspeak in good faith; and I would be the last to begrudge the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is also Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative, for failing momentarily to consider all relevant details when he made his earlier comments on TraceTogether data — that it is used only for contact tracing.

However, having realised the implications of the Criminal Procedure Code, Dr Balakrishnan ultimately decided against persuading Parliament to change the law such that his previous assurances could be kept.

The Government did not even take the initiative to disclose the matter, only revealing possible police use of TraceTogether data and updating the privacy statement of the programme in response to a parliamentary question — and only after TraceTogether data was already used for a murder investigation.

Whatever the merits of the police using the data, the way the matter has been handled and presented to the public as a fait accompli leaves a bad taste in many mouths.

Leaving aside the Government’s track record of adopting a relatively expansive view of what constitutes a “serious offence”, how reassuring can the guarantee by Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam be when previous ministerial assurances on the matter made just six months ago have now been so easily set aside?

Dr Balakrishnan rightly stressed the importance of trust and transparency in Parliament. This is why the Government’s decision not to make good on its word is most baffling for the non-cynical observer.

Given that the police is not lacking in other means in carrying out their duties and in view of his declared willingness to “most happily and cheerfully” stand down the programme when the pandemic ends, the decision to backtrack seems to me to needlessly erode public trust and — if it is not born of overconfidence — to be at best dreadfully short-sighted.