Dear, friends.

Since my last letter in March, the Singapore government has progressively stepped up measures to “flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has kept small business owners like me busy over the last few weeks.

With the recent “circuit breaker” measures announced by the Singapore government last Friday, however, many companies are facing the prospect of either having to close or scale back operations for about a month (from 7 April to 4 May). While many of us are probably still scrambling to work through various issues that these temporary measures portend, when the dust settles, a large population of working adults in Singapore may suddenly find themselves with a little bit more unstructured time on their hands.

If you have been looking to break into the privacy industry or if you’re already a seasoned privacy professional looking to sharpen your skills, this may be a good time to take a look at the online training modules available on the IAPP website or consider undertaking one of our internationally recognized certification programs.

You may also find yourself with more time to delve a little deeper into privacy news and developing trends. In this regard, there are a number of interesting articles in this week’s digest, and thankfully, not all of them are related to the pandemic.

In particular, if you find yourself being invited to many more Zoom calls recently, you may wish to pay a little more attention to recent articles on the measures that the popular videoconferencing app has introduced to counter alleged privacy and security flaws and the "Zoombombing" phenomenon. 

As I write this 8 April, I reflect on the number of times my children have used the Zoom app in recent days, mostly to attend enrichment classes that are now being held virtually. Since today marks the start of home-based learning for local students, the use of Zoom and other similar apps or online learning platforms by the young is only set to increase. In that regard, the guidelines recently released by Hong Kong’s Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data on protecting the privacy of children during the pandemic is absolutely apropos.

The PCPD also released a number of other guides on privacy issues arising from the COVID-19 situation that are well worth going through.

With that, I wish you happy reading. Stay well, stay healthy and, if you can, stay at home.

Kind regards.