Health authorities in South Korea have been accused of playing “Big Brother”, by using facial recognition programmes to track the movement of coronavirus patients.
The city of Bucheon, west of Seoul, is set to carry out a pilot scheme next month which will use artificial intelligence to analyse footage from security cameras, to monitor people who have been diagnosed with Covid-19.
More than 10,000 CCTV crime prevention cameras across the city will be used in the “smart epidemiological investigation system”, which will not only follow the movement of patients, but help to identify their contacts and determine whether they are wearing masks.
“The government’s plan to become Big Brother with the pretext of Covid is a neo-totalitarian idea,” said Park Dae-chul, a member of parliament for the right-wing opposition People Power Party.
“It is absolutely wrong to monitor and control the public via CCTV using taxpayers’ money and without the consent from the public.”
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Unlike many countries that have largely abandoned contact tracing, South Korea continues to employ teams of investigators to carry out the labour-intensive work of interviewing patients to confirm their movements, and identify and isolate those whom they might have infected.
Mobile phones and credit card records are scrutinised, but the job of examining CCTV is time-consuming — hence the implementation of the new surveillance technology.
“It sometimes takes hours to analyse a single piece of CCTV footage,” said Jang Deog-cheon, the mayor of Bucheon. “Using visual recognition technology will enable that analysis in an instant.”
The existing methods of contact tracing are hampered by patients who cannot remember accurately where they have been, or who choose not to tell the truth about it.
Another South Korean city, Ansan, is set to use AI analysis next year to identify early signs of child abuse in daycare centres for young children.
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In addition, on the island of Jeju there are plans for a scheme that will identify people who are subject to injunctions, such as stalkers, who get too close to the homes of their victims.
However, the technology has been criticised as having potentially sinister applications. Similar software is used in China, where it is programmed to identify members of the Uighur ethnic group, who are subject to oppression and internment.
On Friday, the US government imposed sanctions on a Chinese company that is a leading provider of such technology.
