Tracing Digital Contact Tracing: Surveillance Technology and Privacy Rights During COVID-19 in China, South Korea, and the United States

Abstract

In many societies, during large-scale crises such as those involving public health or national security, privacy is often framed as an individual value, right, or responsibility that can be sacrificed, pitted against more important public and social values. Yet, the social importance of privacy has been suggested by various scholars, considering its value for a democratic political system, societal trust, and interdependent or networked nature of privacy. As such, we also find the dichotomous framing that considers privacy as an individual right to be traded off for other public values misleading. It delegitimates discussions and concerns around privacy, and by doing so, unduly privileges some agendas at the sacrifice of certain individuals or marginalized communities.We started this collaborative project, acknowledging such individualistic conceptualization of privacy to be problematic. This project is an attempt to start brainstorming alternative thinking and framing of privacy, particularly in the context of restrained mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. That is, privacy is not necessarily what individuals or certain groups of people should give up when the bigger communities are perceived to be under threat or crisis. Rather, privacy needs to be considered as a collective value and right, which should be carefully considered in discussion of ways to overcome different modes of crises in society. For example, if we are not carefully protective of everyone’s privacy rights during the pandemic, considering only the benefits of being able to trace individuals’ or specific populations’ health records or movements, the consequence may be tied to dire social problems, especially racism and discrimination, which would reinforce existing social polarization with long-lasting impacts on society.We focused on digital contact tracing methods introduced in different parts of the world (i.e., USA, China, and South Korea) to conduct a comparative case study that surveys how each country has approached the global public health crisis at the national level and what implications it brought to the understanding, discourse, and protection of privacy. For case studies on the three countries, we took an approach of “thin description” to reflect upon a variety of texts identified for each country’s context (i.e., the popular press, academic articles, legal documents, government and corporate informational materials). The purpose of this project was rather to provide a brief but a critical overview of privacy implications along with the digital contact tracing technologies introduced and implemented in the three countries that have divergent cultures and political systems.