Controversy Rises Over Korea’s Use of Facial Recognition Technology to Track COVID Patients

We have already seen in China what an authoritarian government can do with this kind of technology. Fortunately South Korea is not an authoritarian government, but it doesn’t mean that someone in government would not be tempted to misuse this technology:

Controversy is arising over a city’s pilot project to combine AI-based facial recognition technology with thousands of surveillance cameras installed in the city to use in the contact tracing for COVID-19 patients. 

While the city government expects that the new system will help carry out swifter and more accurate epidemiological investigations, civic groups have expressed concerns over breaches of privacy and infringements of the personal information of infected people. 

Bucheon City Government in Gyeonggi Province is set to launch the project next month with funding from the Ministry of Science ICT. The local government received 1.6 billion won from the ministry, and allocated its own budget of 500 million won. 

As one of the most populated cities in the metropolitan area with more than 800,000 residents, Bucheon has the highest density of CCTV surveillance cameras in the country, according to city officials. With nearly 10,000 installed, there are 123 cameras per square kilometer. 

“The pilot project, if launched successfully, will drastically reduce the time and resources needed for the contact tracing of COVID-19 patients,” a city official in the Smart City Division, who is in charge of the project, told The Korea Times. 

Korea Times

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