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. – READ MORE