The Utilitarian Approach of South Korea’s Orwellian High-Tech Surveillance to Combat COVID-19

South Korea’s successful response to the novel coronavirus presents privacy concerns and a question of morality.

South Korea’s Response to COVID-19

In order to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic, the South Korean government has made tactical decisions that have led to the country’s successful containment of COVID-19.

Since April 13, 2020, the country has reported less than 30 new cases every day, even earning the praise of the World Health Organization for effectively responding to the virus, despite being one of the first countries to be hard-hit by the infectious disease (Shin, 2020).

As of April 27, 2020, the country reported 10,752 cases and 244 deaths — 8,854 individuals have recovered. South Korea has been able to move forward without implementing draconian measures such as the complete closure of schools and businesses because of the government’s quick efforts to intervene, safely test early and often, isolate rigorously, and ultimately enlist the public’s help. Although South Korea’s measures to contain COVID-19 have been widely applauded, the country’s efforts have come with a cost in civil liberties that countries around the world may be loath to follow.

Early news coverage about coronavirus in February 2020 showed that South Korea had the highest number of cases, causing “170 other countries to impose travel entry bans” on the country’s citizens. As the number of cases continued to accelerate, South Korea deployed rapid, extensive testing coupled with “high-tech monitoring and public notifications” to identify, isolate, and contain the new cases (Klinger, 2020). South Korea’s high praise can primarily be attributed to the government’s immediate response to the pandemic.

Intervening Quickly and Flattening the Curve

Before February, government officials and health authorities met with research groups and medical companies in order to rapidly develop the resources necessary to produce test kits for mass production. South Korea “now produces 100,000 kits per day” and officials have met with tens of foreign governments to provide shipments to countries afflicted with the coronavirus (Fisher, 2020). The government pushed both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals who have come into contact with infected individuals to undergo testing, whereas the United States had restricted testing “to those with severe conditions” due to the disease (Klinger, 2020). Before turning into a crisis, South Korea intervened quickly to test its citizens.

South Korea’s next objective was to “flatten the curve,” a concept that refers to “community isolation measures that keep the daily number of disease cases at a manageable level for medical providers” (Specktor, 2020). In essence, if the acceleration of new infectious disease cases is not contained, a country’s hospital and healthcare system would be overwhelmed beyond capacity, ultimately leaving many people untreated while straining a country’s medical resources.

Depiction of “flattening the curve.”

Testing Early, Often, and Safely

In order to prevent straining the country’s health system, the government opened hundreds of testing centers that were effectively designed to “screen as many people as possible, as quickly as possible” while keeping health workers behind screens and inside chambers to ensure their safety (Fisher, 2020). A screenshot of a YouTube video posted on March 19, 2020 by the South China Morning Post displays these ‘phone booths’ that “are equipped with negative air pressure to prevent air leaks” and stringent disinfecting procedures. A full test only takes seven minutes.

An individual visits a hospital’s ‘phone booth’ set-up in order to get tested for the novel coronavirus.

Beyond testing early, often, and safely, South Korea required foreigners from abroad to download a smartphone application that guides visitors through self-check procedures to identify symptoms of COVID-19. Furthermore, infrastructure in South Korea consisting of office buildings, hospitals, and more have employed “thermal image cameras to identify people with fevers,” ultimately isolating individuals who may be infected with the virus (Fisher, 2020).

Demand for thermal imaging is rising as more companies deploy this technology to identify individuals with fevers, a symptom of the novel coronavirus. Companies like Amazon “are planning to use thermal cameras to detect employees that may be infected,” causing shares of FLIR Systems to rise significantly in the course of April (D’Souza, 2020). From the range of April 1, 2020 to April 24, 2020, $FLIR shares have grown by over 29%. South Korea has leveraged unique and technologically advanced procedures to prevent the spread of coronavirus amongst the country’s people.

Contact Tracing, Isolating, and Surveilling

Once an individual tests positive, health authorities and workers employ a contact tracing procedure in which the infected patient’s movements are retraced in order to identify, test, and isolate any individuals the patient has interacted with. South Korea is able to tap into well-established and practiced procedures for aggressive contact tracing due to the country’s learnings from the former MERS coronavirus outbreak in 2015, which led to 186 cases and 38 deaths (World Health Organization).

As a result of the MERS outbreak, South Korea had laws revised in order to prioritize social security “over individual privacy at times of infectious disease crises,” ultimately allowing the country to deploy procedures that expand the government’s scope of surveillance on its citizens (Fisher, 2020). South Korea’s Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act gives the government the ability to access the network of over one million security cameras, credit card records, and GPS data from cars and cell phones. Access to security camera footage, bank records, and GPS data allows health authorities to aggressively trace the movements of infected patients and the people they’ve come into contact with in order to test, isolate, and quarantine individuals.

In example, a user’s cell phone will “vibrate with emergency alerts whenever new cases are discovered in their districts,” providing individuals with preemptive measures to avoid certain areas (Fisher, 2020). A typical text in English translation may read, “A woman in her 60s has just tested positive…Click on the link for the places she visited before she was hospitalised” (The Guardian, 2020). After a user clicks on the link, the user is routed to a website that provides information about the places the infected patient had traveled to prior to infection.

Furthermore, South Korea has taken the extensive tracking initiative even further by supporting the development of websites and smartphone applications that display the timelines of infected people’s travel on an hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute basis. Other applications provide people with detailed information about the subways infected individuals were on, “which buses they took, when and where they got on and off, [and] even whether or not they were wearing masks” (Fisher, 2020). This level of detail has been deployed at a scale never before seen.

Coronamap.site displays location-based tracking of infected individuals.

After a person tests positive and is ordered into isolation and quarantine, he or she must then download a quarantine-focused application that “alerts officials if a patient ventures out of isolation” (Fisher, 2020). Breaking out of isolation would subject the patient to penalties ranging “from 3 million won ($2,400)…up to 10 million won ($8,100) in fines or one year in prison” (Shin, 2020). The government has taken the violation of self-quarantine as a matter of life or death, especially as South Korea aims to flatten the curve and support public safety. Despite placing these strict measures, the government continues to support its citizens by supplying “shipments of hand sanitizer, masks, fresh produce, and other necessities” for those who are suspected to be or are infected (Marshall, 2020).

Enlisting the Public’s Support

Leaders of the South Korean government have “concluded that subduing the outbreak required keeping citizens fully informed and asking for their cooperation,” ultimately forming a unified front against the virus. Data transparency has been a critical part of the South Korean government’s strategy in maintaining support from its citizens, despite privacy concerns. According to the public polls in South Korea for the fourth week of March, citizens show majority approval for President Moon and the government’s efforts as confidence remains high, “panic low, and no hoarding of supplies” (Fisher, 2020). The graphic below displays Moon’s 14-month high approval rating of 52.5%.

President Moon’s weekly approval rating since the third week of January to the fourth week of March, 2020.

Despite elements of a Big Brother approach to combat the coronavirus, the government’s handling of the global pandemic has gained the support of its citizens and ensured their safety. South Korea deployed a “TRUST” strategy, which serves as an acronym for, “Transparency, Robust screening and quarantine, Unique but universally applicable testing, Strict control, and Treatment” (Klinger, 2020). Constant and consistent messaging from the government to individuals has empowered the public with the data necessary to stay informed, and citizens ultimately feel safer. This method has propelled the country to serve as a potential gold standard for the handling of infectious disease pandemics, as seen by its successful containment of COVID-19.

Innovation in South Korea

It is worth noting that South Korea is known to be technologically-advanced, especially in infrastructure. South Korea ranks eleventh in the Global Innovation Index (GII), an annual ranking of countries published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. The GII is measured considering seven key innovation drivers, which are outlined in the graphic below.

The GII framework is built on sub-pillars composing of individual indicators (80 in total in 2019).

The Impact of South Korea’s Response to COVID-19

On March 3, 2020 South Korea reported 851 new cases of the novel coronavirus, representing the greatest increase in new cases by any country and placing the country at the second highest number of total COVID-19 cases around the world. Through rapid and extensive testing and tracing procedures, the country has prevented COVID-19’s growth. As of April 27, 2020, the country reports only 10 new cases.

As depicted in the graphs below, through the month of March, there is a rapid deceleration of daily new cases and the total number of cases is flattening, with no immediate signs of a resurgence.

Daily New Cases in South Korea

Data and graph gathered from Worldometer.

Total Cases in South Korea

Data and graph gathered from Worldometer.

The New Normal

The South Korean government never had to order a national lockdown because of the country’s effective containment measures. Although 86 countries have had to postpone local and national elections due to COVID-19, South Korea was able to prove its resilience by “voting in parliamentary elections on April 15 in record numbers,” boasting a turnout of 66.2% — “the highest in 28 years” (Moon, 2020). People are now roaming the streets, crowding shopping malls, and ordering food from restaurants in-person as if life has returned to normal. Masks are still widely worn in public. However, there are caveats to how the new “normal” looks.

According to the Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip, citizens are adopting “a new set of standards and culture” for how “[they] meet others, work and study together, and even interact with [their] own family members” as the country feels the ripple effects of change due to COVID-19 (Moon, 2020). Moving forward, the country’s citizens will continue to be wary of social distancing and think twice before shaking someone’s hand or grabbing a door knob. Even as some schools have remained open, students are still taking exams in formats that seem unnatural to the pre-COVID-19 era’s standards.

Applicants take a written examination during a recruitment test for Ansan Urban Corp. on April 4, 2020.

As South Korea adapts to new standards of living, the government is opening an online forum for the public to submit questions, concerns, and suggestions — “a continuation of the government’s policy throughout the crisis of operating with full transparency” (Moon, 2020). However, South Korean citizens have begun to raise new questions about the reconciliation of public health and privacy, especially after learning about and experiencing the government’s technologically advanced capabilities in surveillance.

Privacy Concerns

After the MERS outbreak in 2015, South Korean laws on accessing and publicly sharing private information on its citizens changed drastically, ultimately empowering investigators and government officials with the ability to track people using location-based data. Before countries around the world adopt South Korea’s strong pandemic response, it is important to note that “while widespread testing has been consistently mentioned as a best practice to emulate,” there is uncertainty surrounding the significance of harvesting and disclosing personally identifiable data in regards to the government’s model for success.

Other countries seeking to emulate this model will face challenges in navigating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), “which mandates enhanced data protection requirements for health data.” Although exceptions exist under the GDPR, countries “may not extend to the [vast] data collection that is necessary to conduct the type of contact-tracing that South Korea is doing.” More research into South Korea’s data harvesting and location-based tracking is necessary to validate the government’s decision making. Despite the lack of certainty, the government and its citizens cite the public disclosure and notifications of an infected patient’s location, age, gender, ethnicity, and “district where he or she resides and works” as one of the main drivers behind South Korea’s ability to contain the novel coronavirus while avoiding the imposition of lockdowns (Chan, 2020).

The primary privacy issue at hand surrounds the anonymity of an infected patient because “specifical details about an infected person’s path” can provide enough information for others to connect the dots on an individual’s identity (Kasulis, 2020). The information that is published online “can name specific bars, restaurants, or hotels” alongside a “detailed timeline of [someone’s] whereabouts,” which can ultimately reveal someone’s identity (Kasulis, 2020). The implications of this are vast, but more specifically there have been cases in which “a man who contracted the virus along with his mother, wife, and two children wrote an emotional, lengthy post on Facebook asking people to stop blaming them” for contracting the virus (BBC, 2020). People are taking advantage of the public disclosures to shame individuals.

According to a survey of a thousand people conducted by a research team at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Health, the top three factors that scare South Koreans the most are:

(1) the fear of being stigmatized (3.20/5),

(2) being infected by an asymptomatic patient (3.17/5), and

(3) suspected patients not reporting their symptoms (3.10/5).

Respondents’ primary fear of the disease is social stigmatization. The loss of privacy due to the government’s consistent sharing and notification of personal information has led to online pursuits of patients.

In the wave of prominent celebrities’ suicides in South Korea in 2019, the country introduced new laws that would make cyberbullying education a requirement across all schools. Considering that cyberbullying has been a rampant issue in South Korea, some of these “malicious comments online…have led to suicide” of infected patients (BBC, 2020). As privacy concerns with South Korea’s location-tracking and notification-sharing program continue to gain more awareness, it is critical for the public “to remain mature with this information” in order to prevent the aggressive contact-tracing from doing more harm than good for the well-being of South Koreans (BBC, 2020). Looking forward, people will begin to fear for their privacy even more if the government does not address the appropriate challenges.

The “Moral Minimum” of the South Korean Government

Pandora’s box has been opened by South Korea with location-based tracking. The country’s citizens voice both their concerns about and their support for the government’s actions in using location-based technologies to track infected patients. This issue can be better understood by exploring the moral minimum set forth in the 16th Edition of the Business Law text.

Lawrence Kohlberg was a renowned American psychologist who developed the theory of stages of moral development. According to him, “the morally mature individual bases his actions on ‘principles chosen because of their logical comprehensiveness, their universality, and their consistency.’” The issue lies in the development of standards that can guide all humans to act in ethical ways in varying sociological settings, despite the injection of logic, universality, and consistency. In order to mitigate the concern of universal applicability, one must look “from the perspective of a rational mind” and establish “categories of behavior that stand on their own moral foundation, without any need for justification.” These categories of standards can be considered the moral minimum, or “a set of general standards that constitute the ethical minimum necessary for the functioning of civilization.” Violation of the moral minimum would be considered wrong, compliance would require no justification, and “a rational person would demand a defense or justification for a failure to comply with them” in order to maintain the fabric of the social and economic relationships “that cause a society to function effectively” (Prentice, 2017).

According to the 16th Edition of the Business Law text, there are four potential components of these moral standards:

Honesty: A rational person does not have to justify telling the truth. The expectation for an individual to correctly represent the facts is so firmly ingrained in humans that people expect a justification for not doing so. Without reasonable expectations of honesty, we cannot maintain the personal and business relationships that create order and economic well-being. Loyalty: In any culture there are certain voluntary relationships in which one party places a higher degree of trust and confidence in the other than one would place in a stranger. First, by virtue of the relationship, we have created in the other person a legitimate expectation that we will further his or her interests. Second, the relationship has placed us in a position where we have the ability to cause serious harm if we do not act in that person’s interests. Relationships based on trust and confidence cannot exist without the observance of behavioral standards, and these kinds of relationships contribute greatly to economic efficiency and social order. Keeping Commitments: Social and commercial relationships among people are quite difficult to maintain without accepting the notion that we should keep the promises we make to each other. For this reason, the rational person is not likely to feel it necessary to defend his actions in keeping commitments. Failing to keep them, however, normally requires justification. Doing No Harm: Our actions have both expected and unexpected effects on others, and these effects can be positive or negative. Negative effects are those that damage some legitimate interest of another person. It is generally recognized that people have legitimate interests in their physical, economic, and emotional well-being, as well as in their property, privacy, and reputation. Sometimes our actions have negative consequences for others that we never could have foreseen. When, however, cautious concern for the welfare of others should lead us to anticipate that certain action or inaction may harm the legitimate interests of others, we should do what we can to avoid harm.

In the case of the relationship between the South Korean government and the individual whose location is being tracked, elements of the four components reveal themselves in the country’s history.

Assuming that the government is a body of rational people, it does not have to justify its truth. Working with the assumption that health authorities are rational beings, the people tracking infected patients’ locations should not have to justify the fact that the intensive tracking system is solely used to effectively contain the novel coronavirus. However, the South Korean government has failed to correctly tell the truth in recent history. In 2018, the impeached South Korean President Park Geun-hye was “convicted and sentenced to [24 years] in prison for abuse of power, coercion, and bribery,” leading to a significant decline in public trust of the government (Padden, 2018). The moral minimum of honesty is not met in South Korea.

By virtue of the South Korean government and its duty to serve its people, citizens have an expectation that the government will exist to further their interests. With this assumption, the government bears the responsibility of its power as it has the ability to cause harm to its citizens if South Korean leaders do not act in their interests. Unfortunately, the harm has already been done, as revealed by a 2018 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in which South Korea’s score for “average trust in others” was 0.32 in 2014. Although South Korea as a country is perceived to be less individualistic and more group-oriented, the country’s score for average trust is outranked by so-called individualistic Western societies such as “Norway (0.68), Sweden (0.65), Netherlands (0.54), Canada (0.44), and even the United States (0.41)”. This can be in part explained by the unethical practice of conservative South Korean presidents employing “spy agencies to post millions of fake tweets to skew elections,” even before Russian intervention in U.S. elections in 2016 (Park, 2020). Behavioral standards for trust and loyalty in the country have decreased significantly.

Promises have been broken throughout South Korean politics, a machine that has remained fractious as ever. The Korean Medical Association (KMA) serves to represent doctors across South Korea and “has long been critical of liberal President Moon Jae-in” because of the detrimental effects of his national health insurance expansion on doctors. As President Moon promised his citizens safety through aggressive containment measures, Moon’s advisory panel played a critical role in developing his public health strategy. However, “to acquiesce to the KMA and protect its members from political attacks, the panel decided to voluntarily disband” during one of the most significant global pandemics. Politics in South Korea “caused the nation’s foremost experts in infectious disease to cease advising the president,” leading to the belief from the country’s citizens that the government is unable to keep its commitments to its people (Park, 2020). Without further justification from President Moon, trust continues to dissolve amidst commitment issues.

The actions within South Korean politics have resulted in both expected and unexpected negative effects on the people’s relationship with the government. Although the physical well-being of South Koreans should be the government’s top priority during a global pandemic, top officials and advisors have resigned after succumbing to South Korean politics. Corruption remains rampant, as evidenced by Samsung Group heir Lee Jae-yong’s involvement in a corruption case in which former president Park Geun-hye was involved in bribery, embezzlement, and other crimes throughout the past decade. This case is significant because “Samsung Group, which contributes 25% of the South Korean economy, owns Samsung Electronics,” one of the world’s top smartphone and chip manufacturing players in the industry (Chan-kyong, 2019). South Korean politics have harmed the economic well-being of its citizens and businesses.

South Korean citizens’ concerns with privacy and the ethics surrounding location-based tracking are not unprecedented. The country’s presidents and officials have a history of crumbling to the influence of politics, ultimately engaging in unethical behavior and setting a precedent for missing the mark on meeting the moral minimum with issues such as the invasion of privacy.

Adopting the Utilitarian Perspective

Moral perspectives around the world are diverse and differ by their respective cultures. It is important to ask what “choice would most help sentient beings flourish” in order to navigate the challenges of unfamiliar moral environments, especially during global pandemics when uncertainty is high (Prentice, 2017). The deployment of location-based tracking pushed South Korea into a moral grey area, in which stakeholders affected by the country’s Orwellian high-tech must now navigate the moral pluralism of surveillance. Although social trust has slowly dissolved in the country and its citizens grow more critical, can South Korea’s people set their moral beliefs on privacy aside during pandemics in order to support the greater good?

“Orwellian” is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society.

After dealing with the MERS outbreak in 2015, South Korea had to develop new procedures that reflect a Big Brother methodology — something that is anathema to American and Western standards of personal privacy. Although more research into the importance of elevated surveillance during pandemics is necessary, the country’s people have credited the location-based tracking and notification program for the successful containment of COVID-19.

In certain districts such as Cheonan, South Korea, a resident “launched a petition to South Korea President Moon Jae-in complaining” about the delay in the public release of more travel logs for virus carriers. The petition has drawn over 22,000 supporters across the country. People want more data about infected patients. In contrast, “a coronavirus patient whose personal travel history was released” filed an appeal about privacy violations to the National Human Rights Commission, South Korea’s rights watchdog agency. Although no decisions have been made about the appeal, the agency “called the public disclosures of personal movements ‘beyond necessity’” and backed the Busan resident’s complaint (Kim, 2020). In order to mitigate the moral plurality of these citizens’ perspectives, it will be useful to adopt the moral standard of utilitarianism to serve as a guidepost.

Noted by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, “utilitarianism is an ethical theory that is committed solely to the purpose of promoting ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’” in a society (Prentice, 2017). This consequentialist theory aims to maximize the social benefit and good in society. Although in practice the measure of greatest benefit to society is difficult to quantify, for the case of the COVID-19 global pandemic, one can assume the government applied the number of lives saved as a quantifiable measure. The government can justify the adoption of Orwellian-level surveillance because of the nature of the pandemic, in which the global death toll as of April 28, 2020 sits at 217,132. Thus, compromising the privacy of individuals in hopes of minimizing the death toll creates a net gain in lives preserved. The utilitarian perspective ultimately serves as the basis for South Korea’s COVID-19 strategy.

The perspectives of Bentham and Mill on utilitarianism were primarily focused on legal and social reform. For Bentham, what made certain actions, policies, and laws bad “was their lack of utility” and “their tendency to lead to unhappiness and misery without any compensating happiness.” In order for a society’s political philosophies and social policies to evolve, Bentham believed that “the law is not monolithic and immutable.” Laws are meant to evolve with the changing beliefs and social circumstances of a civilization. Thus, a law that was once considered “good” may be considered a “bad” law in the future. Lawmaking is a “continual process in response to diverse and changing desires that require adjustment,” and in the case of South Korea, the desire was to maximize public health and minimize the number of infections and deaths caused by the novel coronavirus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009). Without South Korea’s revision of laws to enable aggressive contact-tracing following the MERS outbreak in 2015, the country may have seen significantly more cases of COVID-19.

Countries from abroad and citizens from within should continue to observe the South Korean government’s containment efforts moving forward.