South Korea Will Test Facial Recognition Tech To Track People Infected With COVID-19

Bucheon, a city in South Korea, is planning to test a facial recognition system which is built on data from 10,000 surveillance cameras to track those infected with COVID-19.

“The system will be tested in January in Bucheon, a metropolitan area of 800,000 people on the edge of Seoul, the country’s capital. City officials hope the system can help trace the recent movements of people who test positive, their interactions with other people and whether masks were worn,” reported The New York Times.

This system was approved in February by the federal Ministry of Science and Information and Communications Technology. 

“Facial recognition has its limitations. The technology has struggled to identify people who are wearing masks. The huge amount of data required to identify individuals in large populations had also stymied engineers. To make such a system work, authorities must generally have a large database of citizens’ photos for the technology to draw on, raising privacy concerns,” the Times added. “The Bucheon plan seeks to address such concerns, though the details made public are limited. A person’s consent must be obtained before the system may access his or her information, the proposal said, and the data would be provided only to quarantine authorities. It was not clear whether the system would make use of a national or regional database of photos of citizens, or just a local one.”

South Korea isn’t the first country to use facial recognition technology as part of their COVID response. Russia used similar systems to enforce quarantine restrictions on their citizens.

“Moscow is using facial recognition technology to ensure people ordered to remain at home or at their hotels under coronavirus quarantine do so, the mayor of the Russian capital said on Friday,” reported Reuters in February 2020.

“Compliance with the regime is constantly monitored, including with the help of facial recognition systems and other technical measures,” wrote Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, on his website.

The subject of facial recognition software is particularly controversial, especially when it comes to matters of privacy. In November, Facebook even announced that it would be shutting down its facial recognition system, citing “societal concerns” made worse by the fact that “regulators have yet to provide clear rules.”

“We’re shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook,” the company announced in a blog post. “People who’ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos and we will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.”

While acknowledging that facial recognition technology can be a “powerful tool,” Facebook stated that “the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole.”

The potentially invasive use cases for facial recognition have become increasingly clear on the international stage. A bombshell report from the BBC in May, for example, indicated that the Chinese Communist government has been testing an artificial intelligence (AI) emotion-detection camera system on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

A software engineer who claimed to have installed this facial and emotion detection system in police stations in the province home to 12 million ethnic minority Uyghurs said, “The Chinese government use Uyghurs as test subjects for various experiments just like rats are used in laboratories.”

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