Govt dept PDPA is a badly written law
The Privacy and Data Protection Act is a badly written law. It has caused a lot of unnecessary trouble and cost in administration. It does not achieve its primary goal of stopping the real intrusion of privacy.

Here are the bad effects of this law:

a) I have to hear a message from a call center machine that they are recording the message and that I have to give consent. (Hello, do I have any choice?) I heard this message several thousand times. It is tiring and a waste of time.

b) I now see messages that I have to give consent for the organizer to take photo or video recording of a public event (Hello, do I have any choice?)

c) It now declares that the NRIC is a secret ID and cannot be recorded. (Hello, are you an idiot. The NRIC is a public information, like my name. It is a means to identify a person). Because of this declaration, tens of million of dollars have to be spent by organizations to change their computer system and to have alternative ways of identifying people.

Why is this a badly written law? Here are my views.

a) The law should spell out what is an offense, e.g. it is an offense to call somebody on his mobile phone when he has requested that that number is not to be called.

b) The law should spell out that it is all right for an organization to record a telephone conversation for the purpose of a business record, or to take photos or video recording of a public event for the purpose of its business record. We should do away with the need to get individual consent.

c) We should restore the use of NRIC as a public information and to identify a person. If it causes problem with SingPass authentication, the problem should be addressed by the SingPass administrator, e.g. by asking the users to use another identification, rather than the NRIC. (They have already done so).

We need to modify the PDPA law to get rid of the wasteful and stupid practices that add cost to the administration and cause unnecessary hassle to the public, without achieving any useful purpose.

Minister Shanmugan - I hope you are listening.

Tan Kin Lian

 

Add Comment

---