ABSTRACT
Singapore, capital of the world’s highest penetration rate of smartphones, has put its population under permanent surveillance. The techno-ethical model may not be ideologically correct, but it is coherent. This chapter presents a case study that takes Singapore as one of the forerunners of urban control via surveillance, Big Data, and smartphones. The Singapore civil administration has decided unabashedly to make full use of that information to ensure that the people behave and that the city is clean. It is clear that Singapore has taken the international lead in turning genuinely smart. This entails knowing everything possible and useful about not just the city itself but also about its inhabitants. A research team from the Singapore Management University is conducting a pilot project aimed at enhancing elderly monitoring systems with the use of data analytics. There is a see-through factor in transparence that deals with the milieu of transparency. With Big Data, it’s the whole environment itself that is transparent.
