Digital contact tracing in the pandemic cities: Problematizing the regime of traceability in South Korea

Abstract

Since 2020, many countries worldwide have deployed digital contact tracing programs that rely on a range of digital sensors in the city to locate and map the routes of viral spread. Many critical commentaries have raised concerns about the privacy risks and trustworthiness of these programs. Extending these analyses, this paper opens up a different line of questioning that goes beyond privacy-centered single-axis critique of surveillance by considering digital contact tracing symptomatic of the broader changes in modes of urban governance that renders our cities traceable, knowable, and governable through data. Based on archival and real-time analysis of South Korean national and local COVID-19 dashboards, online forums, and interviews with South Korean public health practitioners, this paper offers a sociotechnical analysis of digital contact tracing that looks at the various intersections of state-political, bio-political, and techno-political power dynamics. In contrast to popular narratives that attributed the success of the Korean approach to digital contact tracing to its collectivist culture and smart city infrastructures, this paper suggests that the case can be better understood by looking at both the macro-level shift in the forms of governance that takes on a spatialized and networked character and the micro-level formation of moral responsibility that shape one's conduct as a health and safety-conscious citizens. As the latest realization of the expanding regime of traceability in digital/urban governance, the development of digital contract tracing is seen to parallel with concurrent changes occurring in multiple domains of life including knowledge production, cultural memory, and individual subjectivity.

Keywords

COVID-19 digital contact tracing surveillance and capture regime of traceability South Korea

Introduction

Ongoing debates around COVID-19 digital contact tracing systems compel us to ask anew the long-held questions about technology, privacy, and surveillance. Many efforts to advance digital contact tracing in the North America and Europe have emphasized the importance of “Privacy by Design,” which refers to a design approach that embeds privacy protection and security principles into networked data systems and technology (Cavoukian, 2010). But what do we mean by privacy when we talk about preserving our privacy through technological design? If we suppose our ideas about privacy are “cultural” rather than a universal concept (Agre, 1994), how do we grapple with locally specific and multiple cultural differences that render some technical design acceptable or preferable to others? Are there other contextual variables for critiquing technology that goes beyond simple privacy binarism? Beyond privacy, what is really at stake in the broader range of existing and emerging power dynamics that are amplified through the current critical conjuncture of the pandemic? In this paper, I address these significant challenges around privacy and technology by examining the case of digital contact tracing in South Korea.

Since 2020, there has been a proliferation of works exploring the potential benefits and limitations of designing effective digital systems to support traditional contact tracing work primarily done by human labor. Many public health experts proposed that the array of emerging digital sensing and monitoring tools (apps, sensors, bracelets) would help accelerate the process of identifying routes of viral spread and instantly notifying the potentially infected individuals (Ferretti et al., 2020). The overall consensus in the public health community was that digital contact tracing could function as a potential complement to manual contact tracing, granted that the perceived benefits of such digital systems, such as efficiency, speed, and accuracy, are backed by research-based evidence and public trust in the system (Kahn, 2020). In Europe, various versions of the proof-of-concept system rolled out as an alternative to, or a substitute for, traditional contact tracing in many countries including Norway (Sandvik, 2020), the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Estonia, Switzerland, Poland, and more (Johnson, 2020).

Amongst multiple challenges that lie in the technical project of designing such a system and in the social project of implementing such a program, the issue of privacy has drawn the most attention by both the proponents and critics of technology. One of the major points of debate was gauging the burden (of limiting civil liberty) in proportion to the benefit (public health and safety) so that the system does not end up imposing unnecessary restrictions on civil liberties. Privacy advocates and critical scholars, evoking the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus, have cautioned against further expansion of surveillance amidst the COVID-19 (Datta, 2020; Jiwani, 2020) and “crisis opportunism,” in which governments and corporations exploit the individual will for survival and society's disorientation into their benefit (Cinnamon, 2020; Klein, 2020).

In its wake, digital contact tracing programs in Asian countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong came under scrutiny by the Western media. Initially, many rejected the idea of enabling the government's access to various kinds of personal data. A more moderate side of the debate has gauged which value one should prioritize, between public health versus civil liberty (Kitchin, 2020; White and van Basshuysen, 2021). Skeptics maintained that even if such a centralized approach to digital contact tracing has proven effective in these countries, the Asian model would not transfer in the Western context because people simply would not cooperate, due to differing “cultural norms” of privacy and levels of trust in government. At the same time, some authors wondered if the coronavirus would weaken the liberal order by testing the merits of democracy and authoritarianism (Brands, 2020). And yet, there remains a disproportional preoccupation with surveillance creep that typically relies upon the homogeneous and static notion of privacy (Liu and Graham, 2021). While dismissing and minimizing the question of whether democratic societies do less surveillance than other political systems, the conventional binary of privacy versus surveillance perpetuated, resulting in a stack of analyses that oversimplifies complex dimensions of Asian society (Kang, 2020).

Moving beyond the popular hypes, tropes, and horrors of technology and surveillance and thinking clearly and critically about these issues requires, among other things, a combination of historical perspective and theoretical precision concerning the specific technical iterations and power relations that compose the broader regime of automated traceability within which digital contact tracing system is embedded. Therefore, this paper reexamines the narratives on digital contact tracing by considering a broad range of sociotechnical dynamics surrounding the pandemic cities. To be clear, the analysis presented here is not about the individual account or their reception of digital contact tracing. It is about the changing ways in which the risk and uncertainty become knowable through the data and how they develop in conjunction with surrounding apparatuses, expert systems, cultural norms, and technological objects of all kinds. It also observes how the prevalent rationale to accord objectivity to digital traces parallels the tendency to see the individuals’ account of their own experience as less credible and less reliable than data.

To aid our understanding of the stakes involved in current transition that go beyond the individuals’ loss of privacy, this paper sees the digital contact tracing as signaling a crucial conjuncture between the residual and emergent forms of tracing technologies that correspond with ongoing changes occurring in the domains of knowledge production, forms of governance, and subjectivity. The first part of the paper revisits the static notion of privacy and surveillance from a genealogical perspective that considers, at once, the shifting power configurations that underlie the conditions in which the old techniques of governing cities and their citizens perpetuate through new means. The second part of the paper is a critique of the South Korean digital contact tracing system often characterized as a “centralized” model in contrast to the other “decentralized” model exemplified by the Bluetooth-based decentralized privacy-preserving proximity tracing (DP-3T) and Apple and Google's exposure notification system. I want to look at the situated technologies and techniques comprising the Korean apparatus of contact tracing to see how the problem of privacy, security, and public health is defined and addressed through their implementation. Following is a discussion around the emerging regime of traceability in the pandemic cities. As will be seen, the evolving technologies of digital sensing and mapping tested through the digital contact tracing programs mark a critical conjuncture in an increasingly spatialized and networked form of governance wherein our cities become mechanized into a knowable and traceable target of informational capture.

My primary aim for the paper is neither to endorse nor to object to any of the existing digital contact tracing models. It is rather to introduce audiences to the diversity of ways this technology has been implemented and debated in global contexts. I also do not claim to represent and advocate for a typified view of “Korean” or “Asian” digital contact tracing model which would run the risk of essentializing culture. To clarify my position, this paper explores the implications of digital contact tracing in relation to the broader power dynamics around public health, information technologies, and pandemic cities as these relations articulate in the context of South Korea. The data for this study is drawn from archival and real-time analysis of South Korean COVID-19 dashboards, government websites, and online forums, and 10 interviews with public health workers (P01-P10) who have been involved in South Korean COVID-19 response since March 2020. Interviews were conducted via emails, messenger chats, and Zoom online meetings through January and February of 2021. Based upon the informants’ requests, all the interview quotes cited in this paper are anonymized.

Contextualizing privacy in digital contact tracing

It is worth mentioning that defining privacy is not as easy as one might be tempted to think. According to critical privacy scholar Nissenbaum (2010), what we mean by privacy always escapes us. While many people generally agree that privacy is important, accounts of what privacy is, how much of it do we want or need, and why it is important varies across different settings. Over the recent years, the privacy concept has sprawled to encompass many different connotations including a claim for personal preference, interest, value, control, physical realm (e.g. private vs. public sphere), and universal human right, and thus eludes resolution by straightforward application of a general principle. Whereas many privacy advocates seem to believe that protecting privacy simply means limiting the flow of personal information, the scope of the problem goes way beyond the generalizable design solutions. As an illustrative example, the Bluetooth-based decentralized digital contact tracing methods, such as Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T), MIT Private Automated Contact Tracing (PACT), and Google/Apple Exposure Notification, assuming a purified and reductive concept of privacy, has not accurately interrogated other design flaws and privacy vulnerabilities of such a system, but nevertheless were hailed as a privacy-preserving system by many journalists and academic community.¹

This tendency to default privacy as a central problem of digital ethics resulted in a stack of discussions oriented away from other fundamental inquiries concerning the implications of automating public health governance. It diluted the otherwise complex matters of technopolitical and governmental rationality down to the flat plane of design trade-offs and surveillance creep that supposedly affected everyone equally.² Critical scholarship in surveillance, digitalization, and science and technology studies (STS) has long recognized the limitation of privacy-centered surveillance critique and reframed their analysis focusing on emerging forms of social sorting and differentiation (Andrejevic, 2007; Lyon, 2003) and morphing of existing biopolitical power relations into the regime of “sensory power” (Isin and Ruppert, 2020) and “infopower” (Koopman, 2019). Likewise, Mulligan et al. (2016) have characterized privacy as an essentially contested concept and instead argued for a multi-dimensional analytical frameworks and taxonomies to address the distinctive modes and operations of power that make up the context within which privacy is situated.

From another critical angle, Fuchs (2011) discusses how the concept of privacy is inherently embedded in Western liberal thought and individualism. Fuchs suggests that the desire for protecting privacy is inseparable from the proprietary framework of political economy wherein one's desire to preserve their private property from others characterizes the subjecthood of the capitalist system. In the US, public anxiety around privacy was further reinforced through the late 1950s and early 1960s. Within the context of the Cold War's political hostility against the communists and their sympathizers, people became increasingly wary of mass surveillance and the harmful use of personally sensitive information within large-scale information systems (Kling, 1980: 69–70). As a result, the preference for market-based incentives coupled with the historical distrust of centralized governmental solutions in the US gave rise to a conviction that decentralized ordering via market forces will result in greater individual autonomy than would state intervention.

What these critical analyses on privacy and surveillance remind us is that there is a complex social context around privacy that variably configures our desires, anxieties, and resistance around new information technologies. What is instead needed is a more careful approach that goes beyond treating privacy as a matter of property and possession (i.e. “I either have or do not have privacy”), or as a default universal concept embedded in a simple binary choice of freedom and control. With the COVID-19 crisis continuously disrupting and unsettling the existing sociotechnical conditions around power mechanisms, the binary thinking about surveillance that treats privacy as an end in itself is not only ineffective to challenge these shifting conditions mediated by digital technologies but offers very limited explanatory power in understanding how our subjecthood is being reconfigured through the emergent regime of digital traceability. The prevalent single-axis critique of surveillance centered around privacy, largely relying on the statist notion of power, legality, and sovereignty, does not adequately capture the instances wherein the target of governance is not even conveyed as an “individual” but rather indirectly as an array of “de-identified” and “encrypted” cluster of locations, forms of aggregation, frequencies, distances, proximities, and trajectories. Hence, we need to insist on exploring a more detailed approach to surveillance that looks at the intersection of multiple power dynamics along the axis of state-politics, biopolitics, and technopolitics, among other things, so as to reveal variously emerging forms of asymmetries, hierarchies, and differentiations through which we are governed.³

There are several alternative frameworks that would help us get out of the rigid binary opposition around privacy. First of all, to think historically about digital contact tracing, it is useful to draw from the genealogies of state-politics and its related histories on the administrative data and technologies of population control. Public health surveillance, involving the collection and analysis of health-related data for the purpose of deciding appropriate action, became fully developed into the modern sense in the 19th century (Declich and Carter, 1994). Historians like Joyce (2003) charted the emergence of the modern nation-state which was closely bound with technologies and techniques of population-level health governance, such as statistics, maps, and census. Similarly, scholars have explored the relationship between the public health measures such as urban sanitization and quarantine practice and the imperial government, whose aim of mapping contagion was secretly tied to the defensive and normative imaginaries of the nation and the cities (Bashford, 2004; Gandy, 2006; Winichakul, 1994). In this respect, historical scholarship has shown how health and space have come to matter in ways through statistical techniques of government which served as the means to make reality knowable and governable.

Another necessary historical lens that would aid in our contextualization of digital contact tracing is nicely captured by Foucauldian scholarship on the history of governmentality and biopolitics that has shown how the cities served as a predominant site to produce health-related truth claims that shape people's behaviors as moral citizens (Füller, 2016; Lupton, 2012; Osborne and Rose, 1999). Predicated on an understanding of the “goodness” of the government related to the task of promoting health and well-being of its subjects, the city came to be viewed as a morally saturated “ethicohygienic space” (Osborne and Rose, 1999) wherein citizens and their habitat were ought to be governed. For instance, writing in the context of Hong Kong after the SARS events in 2003, Füller (2016) identifies two distinct biopolitical articulations of the security regime that pervaded into the urban governance sector. One such articulation is observed in the moral imperative underlying the aim to locate the sick bodies and to share that information publicly, and the other is in the broader shift of the object of governance from individual bodies to the city as a collective body. People took it upon as their moral responsibility to add information about infected buildings that were visualized on a publicly accessible digital map. In a similar vein, in the post-9/11 security regime in the US which constantly conjured the images of warfare and terror, the US Department of Homeland Security's aim of securitizing the nation became increasingly aligned with the individual efforts to personalize security responsibility (Hay, 2006). It is within this historical continuity that Hay (2021) looks at the materialities and technologies of testing and tracking COVID-19, as constitutive of the governmental aim of promoting public safety as a “profoundly individualized, active, responsible form of citizenship” (p. 361).

These existing works provide useful analytical toolkits for this study to interrogate the ways in which infectious routes are made visible and calculable through digital contact tracing technologies, as well as its underlying biopolitical rationality that links the government's aim of securitizing the nation with the individual desire and their responsibilization to maintain public safety and health. Although it is tempting to think of the ethics of public health surveillance as a matter of whether we preserve or give up our privacy or how to draw the line between the tolerable kinds of intervention for the sake of greater good, to do so would be to neglect the following questions: What political function does the digital contact tracing system serve? In what governmental strategy is it integrated? What are the historical and political conditions that enable and sustain it? Addressing these questions involves tracing how power pluralizes its forms and strategies across knowledge, discourses, and everyday practices, and shapes our normative assumptions and ethical responsibilities toward ourselves and the others (Foucault, 1980). Without questioning these assumptions behind the categories and principles that frame what is presented as collective ethical “choice,” we end up perpetuating the single-axis analysis of power that supposedly applies to all forms of society, and obscuring other myriad forms of power hierarchies and political rationalities through which we are governed and controlled.

To be sure, there are certain aspects of the COVID-19 crisis that differentiates it from the previous forms of crises. The primary culprit of the crisis is perceived as an omnipresent yet invisible form of virus, which reinforces a new conceptualization of risk that inducts all individuals, things, and locations as potentially hazardous nodes of the viral network. Developments in the technical and managerial expertise in disease governance such as quarantines, sanitary practices, the materiality of disinfection, and medical science, together with the problematization of hygiene and un/healthy bodies in the cities, have long constituted the strategies of the liberal government to “govern through milieu”—meaning, insofar as the new surveillance system is concerned, the object of policing is less concerned with the demographic traits of dangerous individuals than with the forms of social aggregations, such as group size, density, proximity, and location that are contingent and not necessarily specific to individuals. In other words, the COVID-19 crisis amplifies the government's long-term concern with the spatial and temporal aspects of crisis defined in situational terms (O’Malley, 1996).

In light of the long history of public health surveillance and its intersection with state-political, biopolitical, and sociotechnical dynamics, the following section presents an account of how digital contact tracing and exposure notification efforts unfolded in South Korea.

Digital contact tracing in South Korea

Many variations of digital contact tracing exist within the spectrum between the so-called “centralized” model exemplified by the South Korean COVID-19 case investigation system and the app-based “decentralized” exposure notification system enabled by Apple and Google application programming interface (API) (Kahn, 2020). In a basic technical sense, both models utilize emerging digital tools to complement labor-intensive traditional contact tracing and gathers various kinds of digital traces to reconstruct the patients’ routes of infection. But the sociotechnical context surrounding their development and implementation process is diverse, with regard to who is involved in operating the system (actors), what is the prevailing historical and cultural context relevant to information practices (norms), and what is the existing principles of information transmission guiding their actual deployment (legal and regulatory framework).⁴

At a state-political level, the South Korean government quickly and preemptively adopted the Trace, Test, and Treat (3T) strategy since the first patient case was reported on January 20, 2020. Unlike in many other countries that imposed measures such as strict border controls and state-wide lockdowns, the Korean government thus far has not set a travel ban or border closure. Instead, its strategy relied on a series of granular restrictions and mandates including social distancing ordinances, restrictions on group size, QR code-based check-ins and vaccine proofs, as well as an array of smart city technologies to map the routes of infection (for more specific documentation of the Korean response to COVID-19, see Oh et al., 2020; Kim and Ashihara, 2020; Park et al., 2020). Instead of opting for a single smartphone-based contact tracing app, South Korean public health officials formed a national control tower, called the Central Disaster Safety and Countermeasure Headquarters, to oversee the nationwide data collection and monitoring activities through a new data-analysis platform called the Epidemic Investigation Support System (EISS). EISS automated the warrantless access to CCTV footage, patient's medical records, and travel trajectory.

As many have reported, the Korean experience of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2015 was a crucial learning experience that informed its current response to COVID-19 (Sonn and Lee, 2020). Amid the rampant spread of the MERS virus in 2015, the government initially refused to share information publicly about the location of the virus hotspot. It was not only followed by further transmission and deaths but a nationwide fright and public anxiety, for which the government later amended infectious disease-prevention legislation (Thompson, 2020). Under a newly established consensus that prioritizes openness and transparency, a sense of heightened vigilance concerning the national health crisis prevailed. In times of uncertainty, many Koreans weighted their pragmatic argument for the so-called “virtuous surveillance,” a radically transparent version of people-tracking that is subject to public scrutiny and paired with stringent legal safeguards against abuse (Kim, 2020). A consensus was that sacrificing individual privacy was simply the upfront cost of avoiding more debilitating consequences down the line, such as more deaths and an economic downturn (Kim, 2020).

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic made sharply visible the digital apparatus of population management and tracking in Korea, the “virtuous surveillance” through data-driven techniques of population tracing and monitoring had been an integral part of the government's nation-building project throughout the 20th century. One illustrative example is the resident registration system initiated in the 1960s. Under this system, each individual was given a unique number at birth, which the government used to monitor the population's movements for various purposes, including military service, taxation, criminal investigation, and social welfare services. Comprehensive data ranging from the home addresses, marital status, date of birth, family history, and fingerprints have been collected and administered for rational population management and national security (Moon, 2005). Even as the ostensibly militant language of national security governance gave way to a more benign language of safety and healthcare governance in the 21st century, the distinct governmental rationality that required more and more data as the basis of its action continued to persist For instance, the Korean National Health Insurance system, which mandates universal coverage of every employee working in both the private and public sectors, merged the previously disparate insurance programs into a centralized system in 1989. As of 2018, 97.2% of the population is covered under this single insurer (OECD, 2020), and its database, which aggregates the data from all healthcare providers and patients nationwide, has been utilized by the Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) for its COVID-19 health surveillance purpose.⁵ That data constitutes a necessary foundation for scientific knowledge and that a systematic governing of data about otherwise intractable viral entities is needed to better care for “ourselves and our nation,” are the primary rationale that has run through the past and present operation of informational power in Korea.

What is interesting about the current moment is that the data-driven techniques of population tracing and monitoring are rapidly expanding their power domain from the bureaucratic machinery of the government to the governance of the physical urban environment in the cities. In fact, many popular narratives surrounding the Korean response to the pandemic attributed its initial success to its existing smart city infrastructures (Sonn and Lee, 2020). As one of the first countries in the world to roll out a mega-scale smart city plan, such as New Songdo City, since the 1980s, Korea has had a unique intersection between urban culture and digital culture that underpinned its momentum to rapidly proliferate new technologies (Yang, 2020). By 2016, 96.4% of all transactions in Korea became “cashless” with credit cards, debit cards, and smart wallets that often also function as a public transportation card that keeps the record of individual mobility in the city (Sonn and Lee, 2020). The country's most popular taxi-hailing platform, Kakao Taxi, logs the time and location of each ride, taxi license plate numbers, and receipt, which serve as information individuals use to track their journey.

Within this complex techno-cultural landscape, the Korean government stretched its resources to mobilize an array of disciplinary and pre-emptive measures to modify citizen behavior in alignment with its public health goal. As noted above, the extensive and various kinds of data were integrated and analyzed through the Epidemic Investigation Support System (EISS), built upon the country's existing Smart City Data Hub (Kim and Ashihara, 2020). Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) and Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) integrated several existing databases to collect and profile seven categories of data: location data collected from mobile devices, personal identification information, medical records, immigration records, card transaction data, and transit pass records, and CCTV footages (Park et al., 2020).

The epidemiologic investigators worked case-by-case to track down all the potentially infected individuals and locations within this framework. Once the local testing centers confirm a positive case, human contact tracers immediately call the patient's phone to notify them and collect information about their whereabouts during the 2 days preceding the onset of symptoms. They then conduct a detailed investigation on the patient's trajectory to identify all the potential contacts and their level of proximity, using various tracking measures including, but not limited to, the patient's memory, CCTV footages, and card transaction data. A general assumption that the patients’ memory is always incomplete and not always forthcoming serves as a common justification for gathering as much empirical evidence (digital traces) as possible to complement the traditional contact tracing measure. Upon the notice of isolation/quarantine, patients receive a message of consent to their data being used for the epidemic investigation purposes.⁶ When the investigation fails to notify all of those the patient has contacted, they publicly share detailed information about the patient's trajectory through the local government website and broadcast text messages. These messages contain a patient number, gender identified by each patient, and their travel routes that reveal the places visited, duration of their stay, and whether the authorities disinfected the sites (examples below). Information about the patient's name, age, nationality, home, and work address, in principle, remained undisclosed:

- 12/26 (Sat) 14:05-14:15 Paid in cash 3300 won, the taxi driver who picked up two males from Dongsam apartment complex, please contact the local clinic.

- 12/26 (Sat) 18:30-21:00 Shellfish restaurant (157 Songdo beach way), those who used this facility during this time should contact the local clinic. Disinfection complete.

- 12/27 (Sun) 16:01-16:32 Bus number 71, please get in touch with the local clinic for those with symptoms. Disinfection complete.

Another distinctive feature of the Korean digital contact tracing program is that its tracking period encompasses the 2 days prior to the positive test result and the 14-day self-isolation period following the test result or exposure notification. During the mandated isolation period, all the infected individuals are required to download an app called the “Self-Quarantine Safety Protection” developed by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety. It transmits the information from the individuals’ movement patterns, captured by the smartphone's GPS unit combined with cell signal strength, to the designated human contact tracers. When the system red flags a movement deviates from specific parameters, it notifies the authority to follow-up with the individuals via phone call to locate their whereabouts. However, many user reviews of the app found on Google Play and App Store made claims about the inaccuracy of this location tracking method, which often sent false alarms to the authority simply when the app drained the battery and no movement was captured.

To be sure, people's willing participation in the digital contact tracing regime was less driven by their docile submission and trust for the authority than by rampant cynicism and anxiety. Quite contrary to the portrayal of Korean response to the pandemic as a reflection of “Asian culture” such as Confucian collectivism and authoritarian hierarchy, what became more prominent was the constant state of vigilance and peer monitoring that served as a ground for “lateral” forms of tracing and surveillance (Andrejevic, 2004). A growing savviness about the sheer unpredictability of risk, compounded by the collective desire to give a legible shape and form to that risk, gave rise to a strong moral imperative to participate in the investigation process and demand utmost transparency downstream. Open data and the network of digital contact tracing, understood as a resource to keep track of others’ behaviors and, in so doing, to protect oneself, served as a tool that invited everyone to become public health and safety-conscious citizens in the pandemic cities.

One aspect of how the pandemic cities functioned as a morally saturated ethicohygienic space manifested in the ways in which the imaginaries of the world as a series of ongoing deceits and omnipresent risks reinforced the appeal of naïve positivism that placed far more faith on the data than on the human account of disease. This is most evident in the contact tracers’ default assumption that everyone can lie and cannot access their memory accurately and that, therefore, techniques, strategies, and technological devices must be used to cross-check their alibi. In the face of uncertainty, contact tracers saw the digital traces as the only empirically observable and directly verifiable facts even if they defied the first-hand accounts of the human patient and used them to determine the patient's viral trajectory. Interview data from this study have confirmed this tendency, including an exchange I had with a senior nurse (P05) who had been working at a local COVID-19 response center:

P05: When it comes to investigating the trajectories of infected individuals, there would be lots of difficulties doing our job if we were only relying on the responses given by the patients. I encountered many cases when their memories were incomplete or simply inaccurate. There are also many times when they hide those facts from us.

Interviewer: Then let's say there is a mismatch between the what the patients tell you about their whereabouts and what you have derived from the digital data like the CCTV. How do you address that gap?

P05: Digital information is more objective, so we tend to trust that.

This is what Chun (2016) refers to as the reversal of the relationship between experience and judgment wherein the “second-hand non-experience” of machinic memory discredits and devalues human experience and memory. As Chun argues, as individual subjects get dissolved into network subjects, their capacity to understand, imagine, and organize is bypassed by the totalizing knowledge of big data, which prevents them from organizing effective action.

At the same time, a seemingly opposite tendency to posit the individuals as a primary locus of health responsibility became prevalent in the pandemic cities. In the words of one of the informants for this study, a medical doctor (P01) involved in the testing and treatment work for the past and current epidemic:

P01: After experiencing several national crisis management failures like the MERS outbreak and the Sewol Ferry incident a few years ago, we all became wary of the fact that we are ultimately responsible for protecting ourselves. We cannot just rely on the government alone to do the job. It is inaccurate to say that we follow these rules simply because we trust the government or have a more or less disciplined demeanor than the Westerners. You see, it was just about two years ago when we even threw a president out of her office because many of us saw her unfit for the role.

Other interviewees expressed similar frustration toward the government institutions and the populace as an unreliable infrastructure of protection and care. As one public health doctor (P06) who has been working at a regional COVID-19 testing frontline complained:

P06: When a cluster infection breaks out, I get dispatched to the site by a single text message, saying that I have to go to this nursing house by 2 pm, and that's it. There is no other information regarding where exactly they found the positive case, how many cases they found, or what am I ought to be especially cautious about. Still I have to put on my hazmat suit and follow the order like a slave. I take my responsibility and duty as a public health doctor seriously, but I often feel powerless and frustrated. I feel like they are grinding us into the system. No one explains to me what I am supposed to do, how many hours I am expected to be there. I have to play it by ear and hope for the best

It takes some consideration to see how the seemingly contradictory tendencies make up the operative rationale for the same ethicohygienic regime—the tendency to be suspicious about the truthfulness of the other individuals’ account of disease and the tendency to personalize the public health responsibility individually. When the imaginary plane of security and safety evaporates on a mega-scale and when the new reliable structure is yet to emerge, an enduring plane of mentality and risk-consciousness fosters a desperate ethos of survivalism (Kim, 2018). As a prevalent form of governmentality in Korea, survivalism functions less as an agentic choice of taking responsible action and fulfilling civic ends of empowerment than a collective mentality and a rule of conduct that places survival as its sole legitimate end goal. It holds that any normative judgment of actions bases its criteria on their functionality for the survival of the unit it may be concerned with (be it individual, family, state, or nation) (p. 11). That is, people take on their role as survivalist subjects seeking resources and plans of action for their will for survival as a way of coping with perceived uncertainty, anxiety, and vulnerability in the crisis-stricken cities.

In this way, the extensive repository of data collected and analyzed by the EISS was made even further operational by affecting the public's behavioral patterns. The direct rationale for sharing the information was that the people could use it to stay informed about where and how the virus spreads, decide to get tested and quarantine themselves to prevent further spread. On top of strictly following COVID-19 related health guidelines such as washing hands, wearing masks, staying home, and avoiding viral hotspots, people have actively tried to gather as much information as possible about the virus from various sources, including platform news services, television news, interpersonal conversations, and government websites. Mostly placing a higher level of trust and accuracy on the government-generated information than those from other sources such as television news and social media (Lee and Oh, 2020), Koreans personalized the survivalist moral responsibility to safeguard themselves against the perceived risk and crisis by voraciously consuming and demanding their entitled “right to know” more and more COVID-19 related information.

It becomes clear that the terms of debate regarding surveillance, trust, and privacy unfolded differently in Korea than in the US and Europe. It is inaccurate to simply assume that privacy did not matter in Korea. Legal framework privacy does really matter in Korea, even if it seems relatively less salient in relation to public health and the public's entitled “right to know.” What is missing in the current debate is an understanding of how, rather than relying on the false sense of security offered by the government institutions only, people made themselves a productive part of their own survivalist regime by constantly seeking information and generating data about themselves.

From this section, there are two seemingly contradictory, but interrelated aspects of Korean digital contact tracing that are worth reiterating here. One is that the prevalent catastrophizing view of the world that characterizes the individuals as potential transmitters of viral infection, culpable for deceit, gave emergence to the relentlessly positivist assumption that the data would fill the gap in the human (in)ability to control and manage the disease. Thus, the more data are always the better. The other aspect is that the immanent moral imperative of survivalism has shaped people's ethos and willing participation in the system that governs them. The formation and internalization of ethos and will, aligned with the governmental desire to gain datafied forms of knowledge about the disease, were a necessary part of operating the digital contact tracing system. The next section will continue to discuss how the sociotechnical dynamic manifests in the spatialized and networked form of governance in the pandemic cities.

The regime of traceability in the pandemic cities

In the Image of the City, an architectural and urban planning scholar Lynch (1960) argues that individual empowerment is linked to their ability to cognitively map their surroundings to have a perceptible mental image of the city. By this, he asserts that the “art of shaping cities” should consist of techniques and technologies working toward enhancing the cities’ legibility and imageability by their beholders. Presumed on a continual psychological plane between the individual sense of security, orientation, and pleasure and the physical attributes of the cities, Lynch's imageability principle in urban design emphasized a clear and recognizable ordering of each part, such as paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks, which then can be easily connected and reorganized into a coherent pattern grasped by individual citizens. By reducing complexity and rendering the otherwise invisible and complex chaos into a visible form, it is said, the city can better enable the individual to “operate successfully within his environment and to cooperate with his fellows” (p. 46).

According to Chun (2016), the promise of empowering the individuals by increasing the legibility of the cities underlies the current predominance of networks as a key figure and a tool for governance. The pandemic urbanism's emerging spatial-material arrangement enabled by the digital contact tracing program mechanizes the networked relationships among a range of human and non-human agents in the cities, including the individual patients, public health officials, digital sensors, and their traces. In this physical-digital realm, the same logic of legibility persists as a guiding principle to formalize and give shape to the uncertainty. Yet, what is distinct about the present moment is that the widespread availability of tracking and mapping tools enables real-time tracking of an ongoing succession of changes in the pandemic cities. If for Lynch the principles of legibility and imageability were about modifying the physical attributes of the city to cater to an individual ability to map a coherent representation of the city, the current models of digital contact tracing have integrated and extended this logic into a hybrid realm by enacting an ongoing act of sensing, tracing, and updating by various human and non-human actors in the urban viral networks.

As an illustrative example, consider several citizen-driven COVID-19 mapping projects in Korea. In February 2020, a woman in her 60 s from the southern city of Daegu tested positive and was assigned patient number 31, marking the 31st confirmed case of COVID-19 in Korea. She was later known as the “super-spreader” responsible for the biggest viral spread and cluster of over 1000 related cases (Shin et al., 2020). Her publicly known travel history revealed that she was a member of a controversial religious sect called the Shincheonji Church of Jesus. The church leadership, known for its clandestine operative style that is highly protective of their members’ identity, initially refused to cooperate with the public health authority to help track down patient 31's contacts, despite her attendance to worship services with at least a thousand church members. It triggered widespread public angst and condemnation of the church, which was already held with suspicion even before the pandemic. Amidst the escalating public anger, one developer released an app-based digital map in August 2020 that identified Shincheonji's obscure facilities across the country. Location data for the app was initially crowd-sourced, meaning they were based on reports from individuals affected by the church and the data offered by the local government.

Other similar app-based digital map services proliferated and were widely used during the same period, including the Coronavirus Map (downloaded by more than 3.5 million users in March 2020) that enabled users to gauge their proximity to the viral hotspots and local testing centers and the Public Mask app provided a real-time location and inventory of mask supplies in pharmacies and other distribution centers. College students, hackers, and startup business employees who developed these apps utilized the government's provision of open API (application programming interface) and comprehensive and real-time data on the government-confirmed patients’ numbers, their trajectories, list of local clinics, hotspots, and inventory of masks, hand sanitizers, and protective gears and their distribution locations. By continuously sorting their environment into different categories of risks and resources through these services, the individuals increasingly came to view and map their relations with the city in datafied terms. As a means of visualizing the invisible form of risk and calculating the physical distance between threats and the individual users, these maps served as a basis for consequentially modifying individual spatial behaviors by organizing their mobile trajectories within cities.

Together with these app-based COVID-19 maps, the broad governmental program of digital contact tracing constitutes “the new norms” of living in the pandemic cities that instrumentalize the existing technologies and techniques of mapping, monitoring, and rationalizing urban space. To the extent that the individuals’ mobility can be specified and represented through digital traces and their “grammars of actions” can be made legible, the activities in question are already subjected to being reorganized according to the pre-imposed categories, data input and output formats, availability of sensors, and so forth (Agre, 1994).⁷ In other words, in planning and constructing their own activities such as visiting a restaurant or deciding on the mode of transportation to get to their destination, individuals already anticipate and integrate the digital elements into their consideration so that their actions remain within the normative parameters and boundaries imposed by the contact tracing program.

Interrogating how the normative forces have shaped and reinforced this mechanism goes beyond asking the general question of whether the individual was given a free choice to either participate in or resist the process and thus felt empowered. The evolving techno-political dynamic that is taking a stronger hold through this mechanism is the tendency to granularly specify and represent the individual spatial actions into a series of standardized and encrypted data. The stakes involved with such sociotechnical advancements, for which digital contact tracing is the prime example, are that the system aiming to shape and induce our pro-social and pro-health behavior naturalizes a peculiar premise that the experience of life itself is equated with the trajectory and traces captured by the data. As “mediated memories” that are products of a range of digital traces capturing individual trajectory (van Dijck, 2004), the assemblage of contact tracing data then functions as a precursor of a full and accurate representation of our mobility and the primary register to computationally reconstruct and reorganize the first-hand account of our experiences. It is in this sense Benjamin Bratton (2015) argues that “perhaps the real nightmare, even worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know” (Bratton, 2015: 70). That is, as most of us become less and less capable of knowing of when and how our actions are captured and mediated in the cities, we are also made productive as interfaces sustaining and contributing to the mediated memories that are already seen to exceed and supersede our account of our own experiences. A more profound stake involved with the digital contact tracing that deserves our attention then becomes less of a concern about how our discrete identities are represented with more or less amount of accuracy than of observing the ways in which the techniques, forms, and categories that capture our experiences increasingly become unknowable and alienated from us, rendering our own narratives of experience irrelevant and untrustworthy, as well as the ways that the very categories are still used to sort and differentiate our behaviors and urban landscape so that they are more easily trackable by computers.

Conclusion

In this paper, I charted various intersections between state-political, biopolitical, and techno-political power dynamics surrounding Korea's digital contact tracing system. It was meant as an extension as well as a corrective to many privacy-centered single-axis critiques of surveillance inherent in many critical commentaries. While many have been concerned about the questions of “who” governs, and is governed by, the system and “what” is being transmitted under which circumstances, they tended to focus less on the question of “how” digital contact tracing might shift our relationship with technology and the cities, and more specifically, the ways that we map our position in the world. One worrisome outcome of such omission was the claim that the so-called “decentralized” contact tracing models, as opposed to “centralized” ones, are more privacy-preserving and thus ethically superior. These claims were predicated on the normative assumptions that default privacy as a central problem of data ethics and regard privacy as something that can be “preserved” by limiting the flow of personal information within local systems.

This paper suggested that by merely viewing privacy as an equivalent to anonymity or a matter of restricting access, we miss the opportunity to more comprehensively address the broader sociotechnical dynamics that complicate and contest privacy as a discrete concept. The stakes surrounding the current development of digital contact tracing programs may be that the “individual” is not even a discrete thing the system strives to know. We should direct more attention to how it diminishes our capacity as individuals to perceive and narrate our own experiences, claim knowledge of that narrative, and map complex ways in which multiple domains of our lives become reorganized according to computational logic. That decentralized tracing model is less pervasive and more democratic is not only false but fictitious at best It perpetuates the naive misconception that decentralization can evade systems of oppression and control.

Using a broad framework of the problem beyond privacy dichotomy, this paper considered digital contact tracing symptomatic of a persistently expanding data-driven governance regime that renders risks and uncertainty legible and traceable through data. Parallel to this macro-level shift in the mode of governance, it also observed a micro-level tendency to disregard individual narration of their own first-hand experience as more fallible and untrustworthy than empirically verifiable evidence of digital traces. In the context of South Korea, this rampant cynicism combined with data positivism, rather than people's unrelenting trust for the government, was a significant underlying force behind their willing participation in the digital contact tracing system. Upon this normative plane, people integrated the digital techniques of mapping, sensing, monitoring, and tracing into their daily actions while traversing the cities and personalized moral responsibilities to make the invisible visible and to distance themselves from the perceived threats.

Of course, it goes without saying that no matter how thorough the sensing and tracing programs are designed and implemented, there are always parts of our experiences that are not captured by the data. In fact, this paper did not adequately highlight the existence of necessary human labor in operating the digital contact tracing programs. Many popular narratives surrounding the Korean contact tracing program often attributed its success to the country's smart city digital infrastructures, egregiously omitting the account of overextended public health doctors and human contact tracers.⁸ Nor did this paper directly account for the real-life consequences of those who are stigmatized by not complying with the contact tracing systems as well as those double-burdened by the false assumptions about big data projected as a know-it-all entity, despite many of its known failures. These are important entry points for future studies that would follow this article.

This paper focused on a strategy of critique that inquired the historical and cultural forces enabling the emergence contact tracing rather than condemning its consequences, yet. If this analysis was successful, the paper has shown that despite the differences in the surface forms, various models of digital contact tracing together constitute a coherent genealogy of the same digital regime in which the city is instrumentalized as a problem and target of computational tracing. The technical advancements in distributed and decentralized computing continue to impose a system of rules upon the micro-level organization of our everyday activities while permitting freedom and mobility on the surface. Further questions surrounding digital contact tracing are to be concerned about such contradictions and ambivalence surrounding normative claims, and the discourse of “empowerment” in particular, to interrogate the specific genealogies and contexts of techniques, forms, and categories that measure, sort, and evaluate our experiences.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Chamee Yang

Notes

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