South Korea is generally considered a success story when it come comes to battling the coronavirus, but to privacy advocates it also raises no few warning signs about the darker possibilities of AI in healthcare.
As a recent article described, the South Korean government has allowed tech firms much greater access to personal information to fight the pandemic.
“Armed with an infectious disease law that was strengthened after a 2015 outbreak of a different coronavirus, MERS, health authorities have aggressively used credit-card records, surveillance videos and cellphone data to find and isolate potential virus carriers,” the writer explained. “Locations where patients went before they were diagnosed are published on websites and released through cellphone alerts. Smartphone tracking apps are used to monitor around 30,000 individuals quarantined at home. Starting in June, entertainment venues will be required to register customers with smartphone QR codes so they could be easily located if needed.”
One problem already encountered, however, is that people “have often managed to trace back the online information to the unnamed virus carriers, exposing embarrassing personal details and making them targets of public contempt.”
Still, a South Korean AI firm, SK Telecom, has unveiled, and begun using on behalf of the government, AI-enabled “smart” speakers that allow them to monitor in their homes citizens, primarily elderly, who have signed up for the service.
“We closely monitor for signs of danger, whether they are more frequently using search words that indicate rising states of loneliness or insecurity,” explained Hwang Seungwon, director of a social enterprise established by SK Telecom to handle the service. Trigger words lead to a recommendation for a visit by local public health officials.
According to the article, around 3,200 people across the country, “mostly older than 70 and living alone, have so far allowed the SK Telecom speakers to listen to them 24 hours a day since the service launched in April 2019.”
And that figure is expected at least double by the end of the year, judging by local government interest.
On a broad scale, “the past months have exposed a stark division about the best ways to make important decisions when privacy concerns collide with public health needs, said Haksoo Ko, a Seoul National University law professor and co-director of the school’s Artificial Intelligence Policy Initiative.
South Korea’s anti-virus experience provides “lots of lessons and implications” as it steps toward a data-driven economy, Ko said.
“With data, it’s bad to take ‘the more, the better’ approach,” he said. “An appropriate control system needs to be baked into the process, to make decisions on data access based on necessity and sensitivity and restrict access to information that isn’t really needed.”