South Korea To Trial AI-Based Facial Recognition To Track COVID-19 Cases

Illustration of residents' activities in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Unsplash/Kate Trifo)

JAKARTA - South Korea will soon launch a pilot project to use artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition and thousands of CCTV cameras to track the movements of people infected with the coronavirus, despite concerns about privacy breaches.

The nationally funded project in Bucheon, one of the country's most populous cities on the outskirts of Seoul, will start operating in January, a city official told Reuters.

The system uses AI algorithms and facial recognition technology, to analyze footage collected by more than 10.820 CCTV cameras and track the movements of infected people, anyone with close contact, and whether they are wearing masks, according to a program plan from the city submitted to the Ministry. Science and ICT (Information and Communication Technology), and was presented to Reuters by MPs critical of the project.

Governments around the world have turned to new technologies and expanded legal powers to try to stem the tide of COVID-19 infections. China, Russia, India, Poland and Japan as well as several US states are among governments that have launched or at least experimented with facial recognition systems to track COVID-19 patients, according to a March report by Columbia Law School in New York.

Bucheon officials said the system should reduce the strain on overworked tracking teams in a city with a population of more than 800.000 people, helping to use the team more efficiently and accurately.

Meanwhile, South Korea already has an aggressive high-tech contact tracing system, which collects credit card records, cell phone location data and CCTV footage, among other personal information.

Illustration of COVID-19 in South Korea. (Wikimedia Commons/Piotrus)

However, it still relies on large numbers of epidemiological investigators, who often have to work 24-hour shifts, frantically tracking and contacting potential cases of the coronavirus.

In bidding for national funding for a pilot project in late 2020, Bucheon Mayor Jang Deog-cheon argued such a system would make tracing faster.

"Sometimes it can take hours to analyze a single CCTV footage. Using visual recognition technology will enable that analysis in an instant," he said on Twitter.

The system is also designed to address the fact that tracking teams must rely heavily on the testimonies of COVID-19 patients, who are not always honest about their activities and whereabouts, the plan says.

Separately, the Ministry of Science and ICT said it had no current plans to expand the project to a national level. It says the aim of the system is to digitize some of the manual work that contact tracers have to do nowadays.

Bucheon's system can simultaneously track up to ten people in five to ten minutes, cutting time spent on manual work that takes about half an hour to an hour to track a single person, the plan says.

Illustration. (Unsplash/Kay Lau)

The pilot plan calls for a team of about ten staff at a public health center to deploy an AI-powered recognition system, the official said.

It is known that Bucheon received 1.6 billion won (1.36 million US dollars) from the Ministry of Science and ICT and injected 500 million won from the city budget into the project to build the system, Bucheon officials said.

Rights

Despite widespread public support for existing invasive tracking and tracing methods, human rights defenders and some South Korean lawmakers have expressed concern that the government will retain and leverage the data far beyond the needs of the pandemic.

"The government's plan to become Big Brother under the pretext of COVID is a neo-totalitarian idea," critic Park Dae-chul, a lawmaker from the main opposition People Power Party, told Reuters.

"It is absolutely wrong to monitor and control the public through CCTV using taxpayers' money and without the consent of the public," Park said.

Meanwhile, Bucheon officials said there were no privacy concerns as the system places a mosaic on the face of anyone who is not the subject.

"There are no privacy concerns here, as the system tracks confirmed patients under the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act. Contact tracing adheres to those rules, so there is no risk of data spills or privacy breaches," the official said.

To note, the rules say patients must give their consent for facial recognition tracking to be used. But, if they don't agree, the system can still track them using their silhouettes and clothing, the official said.

Meanwhile, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said the use of the technology was legal as long as it was used in the field of disease control and prevention law.