The travel details are being published on South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare website and are open to the public, allowing people to check whether they may have come into contact with an infected person.
Officials are putting together travel details using tracking technology that enables them to search credit card records, closed circuit television footage, cellphone location services, public transit cards and immigration records.
The published travel records are very detailed. For example, the logs notes that patient No. 17 ate at a soft-tofu restaurant in Seoul before getting on a 12:40 p.m. train.
The website does not name any of the patients. The patients know that their information is being gathered and their recent whereabouts disclosed to the public, but they are not given the opportunity to refuse its release.
While other counties in Asia also have been tracking people infected with COVID-19, the official name of the coronavirus strain that originated in central China, the tracking employed in South Korea is distinguished by the amount details officials are disclosing to the public.
Officials in other Asian counties are gathering their information primarily via face-to-face interviews with infected people, along with other methods, including the use of data provided by transport organizations.
According to experts, South Korea’s release of personal information would face a backlash in Western countries and likely would break Western privacy laws.
The effectiveness of publishing this sort of data is not clear, the Journal reports.
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