Once a required period of quarantine is completed, individuals are free to go to work and attend social activities (e.g. If an individual who is required to be quarantining is found to move away from their address, or turns off their phone, police and local officials are alerted. Authorities then make contact with the individual within 15 minutes. Taiwan has used data from cell-phone masts to track whether an individual suspected to have Covid-19 (or who has been in close proximity to someone who had the virus) is abiding by a mandatory quarantine period. Taiwan has taken a more top-down approach to contact tracing, tracking quarantined people’s phones directly through geofencing. Taiwan: Looking ahead to the holiday season To this point, the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute, Jerome Kim, asserted that South Korea had contained the virus through “decisive and transparent leadership based on data, not emotion”. However, the combination of these tracking tools has raised international concerns about the potential infringement on an individual’s right to privacy. Through a combination of GPS phone tracking, surveillance camera records and credit card transactions, the KCDC has been able to issue real-time alerts about where infected people had been prior to receiving a positive diagnosis for Covid-19. Taiwan has taken a more top-down approach to contact tracing, tracking quarantined people’s phones directly through geofencing Ultimately, the utilisation of the Smart City Data Hub reduced contact tracing time from 24 hours to ten minutes. The data hub also includes a feature where an individual’s movements can be tracked.
However, running these requests through the country’s Smart City Data Hub allowed the process to be streamlined, as “the request for information and the response are processed in one place”. The National Policy Agency had previously been required to request contact information from several agencies in order to contact an individual likely to be infected with Covid-19. However, the centre concluded that this system operated too slowly and decided to adjust the process. Originally, the KCDC “ran requests for location histories through the police, who used their channels to data controllers to retrieve the required information,” as noted in the Economist. While it is too early to tell which forms are most successful in tracking the disease, this overview summarises different approaches for public servants to consider, review and test.Īs coronavirus began to spread across Asia, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) recognised the need to track the proliferation of Covid-19 through its own population. But the innovation has also been met with scepticism from privacy-minded citizens and civil society organisations that fear it could be a slippery slope towards an Orwellian surveillance state.
South Korea, Taiwan and states across Europe have adopted different processes for creating contact tracing tools.
The benefits of contact tracing are two-fold: it can help governments and citizens alike to see where the disease is spreading rapidly, as well as alert people when they have been in contact with someone who has the virus. To keep track of the spread of cases, many states are adopting forms of contact tracing, which, in simple terms, means amalgamating information on people who have been in close proximity to an infected individual. As the peak of the virus starts to subside in many countries, politicians and health experts have been expressing concerns about the potential emergence of a second peak. This article is written by Rosalind Kennybirch, Consultant covering tech policy, Lexington Communications and is published on:įrom creating a decentralised app to adopting a smart city dashboard, countries are adopting different approaches to mitigating the effects of coronavirus as it spreads across the world. How countries across the world are considering data usage and the right to privacy as they develop contact tracing applications