In South Korea a Big Brother reveals the lives of the infected

South Korea has adopted a system that warns the population in real time about where new cases of coronavirus are recorded, providing detailed information on the latest movements of people tested positive. The system allows to know if there are risks of having been infected, in a country with over 6 thousand cases, but it is having heavy repercussions on the protection of the privacy of the sick: even if they do not indicate their names or addresses, in fact, patients are often easily identifiable crossing ages, neighborhoods and activities and thus see their lives put on the streets.

Messages are continuously sent to citizens’ mobile phones indicating new cases with the patient’s age and gender being positive, his last movements before the test and in some cases an indication of the work of the person from whom he was infected. No detail is spared, including the time you have been in a bar rather than a motel by the hour and it seems that several betrayals have come to light in this way. And in any case the fact of being identifiable makes life difficult even for those infected with a few symptoms who would not have wanted to reveal the disease and now they see themselves held up as plague victims.

The information is also collected and published on the website of the Ministry of Health, which can be consulted by anyone, and so extra-marital relationships, private ties and unacknowledged habits are discovered. For example, of a 27-year-old who works at Samsung in Gumi, it was learned that at 11.30 pm on February 18 she had met with her partner who is a member of Shincheonji, the sect that has become a national outbreak. Her fellow citizens asked to know where she lived and she begged the mayor on Facebook not to provide any further information after she had already given her surname.

A man who had contracted the virus together with his mother, wife and two children wrote a Facebook post asking people to stop attacking him, explaining that he was unaware that his mother was in the Shincheonji sect and that his wife, a disabled nurse, did not know she was positive.

The transparency adopted by South Korea derives from the experience of 2015, when the government was highly criticized for keeping secret the information on the people infected by the Mers epidemic. Since then the laws have been modified to give more powers to those who investigate the movements of the infected in the event of epidemics.

“We know this is a terrain of sensitive personal data,” Goh Jae-young, an official from the Korean Center for Disease Prevention, told BBC. “We first interview the patients and try to gather information, emphasizing that they affect the health and safety of the whole population,” he explained,
“then to verify any reticence we use GPS data, images from surveillance cameras and credit card transactions to trace the movements before the symptoms of the coronavirus appeared”.

Not all movements are disclosed to the public, only those in which the patient may have been in crowded places or has not worn a mask.