It's not clear to me what this draft is about.

Contact tracing actually turned out to be mostly useless in combatting SARS-Co-v2 infections, because the disease spread so easily: one might as well have done contact tracing for influenza. Other mitigation measures, including comprehensive testing, isolation of all foreigners, and the presence of a first-class health care system might well turn out to have been far more important. If there is professional epidemiological evidence of the importance of contact tracing as opposed to other mitigation measures, you don't cite or refer to it. China, of course, used even more invasive mitigation measures, including subjecting entire populations to de facto imprisonment for long periods of time, but did not achieve anything like equivalent mitigation. Its essentially haphazard and weak healthcare system accounts largely for its casualty rates. There is meanwhile no evidence that all the payments-system tracking improved health results above those in other small, wealthy, Confucian societies, like Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, that used mobile-phone based contact tracing without all the other domestic spying.

Your sole conclusion from the rather lengthy factual review is that the value placed upon personal freedom, including privacy, is culturally relative. That seems like an easy conclusion to draw and I don't think any reader will doubt it. My spring course (Computers, Privacy and the Constitution) which actually treats your subject, is built around that assumption as well, inasmuch as I think the cultural history of the US constitutions is necessarily the real basis of our thinking about citizens' rights under conditions of rapid technological change.

The primary route to improvement, therefore, seems to be to me to go past the point where the present draft stops. You can heavily cut your factual recitation: a paragraph and a link or three suffices to document the perceived difference in cultural outlooks. This frees the space for you to take the idea further, in some direction that helps the reader learn something less evident, and perhaps transcends the sterile "privacy v. safety" framing we hear so much about and learn so little from.

Why aren't these just links in the text, anchored to the relevant phrases in the draft? We are reading and writing in the Web: how does it serve the reader, who can just click on a link to read the source, to have to scroll around in your document to find the relevant link to consult?

Surveillance, Safety, and Scandal

-- By HyewonKim - 23 Oct 2024

Introduction

During the COVID-19 outbreak, South Korea was widely commended for its efficient and effective response. South Korea and the United States both reported their first case in January 2020 but had completely different trajectories moving forward. By September 2020, South Korea had logged only 23,000 cases while the United States had an average of over 40,000 new cases a day. The reason for this vast difference? Surveillance.

Surveillance

In a highly technological and cashless society, it was incredibly easy for the South Korean government to utilize its credit card and bank transaction database to retroactively track where people went. People use their credit cards to pay for groceries at the supermarket, dinner at a restaurant, and especially to use public transportation in Seoul. In addition, cell phone providers in South Korea are required to log connections between cell phone towers and phones. The cell phone logs were able to confirm that Patient #3 visited the supermarket and Patient #4 at dinner at X restaurant. On top of tracking credit card transactions and cell phone logs, the government utilized its 1.7 million closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public places to confirm additional details, such as whether Patient #3 and Patient #4 were wearing masks and were accompanied by others when visiting the supermarket or restaurant.

Safety

The highly detailed level of surveillance and specific information gathered from tracking credit card and cell phone use on top of CCTV data allowed the government to quickly quarantine and sterilize locations visited by patients. The public was also able to determine whether they were in proximity to patients and decide to get tested themselves or avoid specific areas that were recently visited by a patient.

While this level of surveillance may be shocking, the public opinion of South Korea has been overwhelmingly positive. COVID-19 fatalities in South Korea are a third of the global average. The US has about 341 COVID-19-related deaths per 100,000 population whereas South Korea has about 66 deaths. People were willing to sacrifice their privacy and submit themselves to extremely detailed tracking in exchange for not getting sick, not getting someone they love sick, and not dying.

Scandal

It’s no surprise the plethora of social issues that arise from publishing extremely detailed activity of patients. For example, an alert would say “Male, 58, an employee at a bank passed by X area and visited a hotel between X times, and then went to X movie theater.” Someone living in the area may be able to take their pieces of information and figure out that this is Mr. Kim who works at KB Bank. But Mr. Kim is married, so why did he go to a hotel? He must be having an extramarital affair. A similar case where speculation of someone having an extramarital affair arose from an alert stating that a male shared a meal with his sister-in-law. Why was he meeting his sister-in-law without his wife? It’s weird for someone to be so close to their sister-in-law.

The public was able to apply their own personal standards of a “good husband” or “good person” when reading these alerts. In addition to the stigma of being a COVID-19 patient even after recovery, patients were subject to social scrutiny and unrealistic standards of the South Korean public. Why did a nurse visit so many places in a short amount of time when she should have been more careful as a nurse? Why did Patient X go clubbing when they should be more cautious during the COVID-19 outbreak?

It’s questionable whether there are any lessons about individual privacy and the dangers of surveillance arising from the South Korean government’s contact tracing program. The majority of the South Korean population is largely unopposed to the attack on their privacy and values their safety over privacy. If this had happened in a more individualistic country like the United States and Australia, there’s no doubt that individuals would have complained about the government's infringement of various freedoms. In a collectivist country like South Korea, this era of extreme surveillance and contact tracing is seen more as a necessary action than a necessary evil. If one country is able to accept attacks on privacy and personal freedom as a norm, then it raises the question of whether the value of privacy is society-dependent.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51733145

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-south-korea-tracking-apps/2020/03/13/2bed568e-5fac-11ea-ac50-18701e14e06d_story.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/coronavirus-tracking-app-cheating-partners-married-south-korea-affair-a9514996.html

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/02/849535944/south-koreas-tracking-of-covid-19-patients-raises-privacy-concerns

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2020/10/12/parti-covid-19-contact-tracing-why-south-koreas-success-is-hard-to-replicate/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-surveillance-technology-powered-south-koreas-covid-19-response/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/651509/south-korea-cctv-cameras/

https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230524000629

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality