New technology is being used to map the spread of coronavirus in stunning detail


New technology is being used to map the spread of coronavirus in stunning detail

For South Koreans worried about the spread of coronavirus, a new wave of unofficial websites has emerged to help them keep track of neighbours who have been infected.

If you’re a resident of the coastal city of Pohang, for instance, firing up coronamap.live and zooming in on your city presents you with a sea of green, orange and red map markers

Click on the markers, and you can instantly see the movements of individual people who have contracted the disease in stunning detail. 

One set of markers shows that a resident with the virus started their day at a gym, before grabbing some food and going shopping from 12.40pm to 1.40pm before eventually being admitted to hospital.

Another site lists the latest statistics on the virus in South Korea, along with a database of infected people and their minute-by-minute movements in the days before they went to hospital.

Most people in the database are described as “under treatment.” Occasionally, their status switches to “dead” – represented by a grey box.

Websites like these have exploded in popularity as residents seek more precise information on how and where coronavirus has spread.

The sites are only able to display this data because the South Korean government took an unusual and controversial step: to release the precise hour-by-hour movements of people who had been infected with the virus.

A South Korean health official told Reuters that “we experienced a public backlash after a mass infection took place during the MERS outbreak five years ago, because we didn’t make public where those patients had gone.”

The database is technically anonymised, meaning no names are attached to its contents, but privacy experts told The Telegraph that the amount of information included in the database could easily lead to people’s real identities being exposed.

The public release of the data is discouraging some people from leaving their homes.

Why risk heading out for a coffee when your precise movements could later be broadcast to the world if you’re infected?

Dr Oli Buckley from the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia, said: “It feels like [the websites] are relying on social conformity in that people dread being the cause of another data point on the map.”

“There’s potentially a sense of shame associated with being ‘exposed’ as infected and rightly or wrongly that’s driving behaviours.”

The developer of the coronamap.live site, 19-year-old Ryan Jun-seo Hong, told Reuters that his project has grown to attract 300,000 visitors every day.

And a husband and wife pair who run another site tracking coronavirus’ spread in South Korea said that “it was easy to update the page up until the beginning of last week, but with tens of new patients every few hours, it’s starting to take a toll on us.”

The sites have been widely shared on social media as Koreans look for information on coronavirus.

The development of the South Korean websites comes after the Chinese government turned to technological solutions to track the initial spread of the virus from its origins in the city of Wuhan.

Alibaba’s payments app Alipay developed a colour-coding system which gives people a red code and advises them to enter quarantine if they report symptoms of the virus.

People in China have claimed that they have been asked to display the results of the smartphone test when entering some apartment buildings and supermarkets.

Chinese developers have also produced similar coronavirus-tracking apps which use information released by the country’s government to map where the virus has spread in China.

WeChat, the messaging and payments app developed by Chinese internet giant Tencent, has developed one of the coronavirus tracking services.

One user of the apps says that they provide “psychological comfort.” She claims that “you can’t guarantee there won’t be fresh cases, but you can avoid an area that’s already hit.”

And SenseTime, a Chinese facial recognition business, claims to have developed new cameras which it says can detect when people are not wearing masks in public and then block them from entering buildings until they cover their face.

There are now calls for the UK to also provide precise data on coronavirus patients in this country.

Nick Holland, a British developer, shared one of the South Korean tracking websites on social media and urged the Government to replicate its public display of information for British people who have contracted coronavirus.

“I would certainly feel more comfortable seeing a map of where people have been in the UK who have been infected,” he says, “I’ve got a premature baby. Their immune systems aren’t that great. So I’m a bit more paranoid about things like that.”

“I’d certainly like it myself, but I think the Government may think it would cause panic for people in the areas where people have been that are infected,” he adds.

Public Health England did not respond when asked if UK ministers are considering releasing similar levels of transparency about coronavirus patients in the UK.

Jim Killock, the executive director of privacy organisation Open Rights Group, warned against similar sites being created in the UK.

“The UK Government needs to be careful to provide information that is useful and in a responsible way, rather than encouraging panic, ostracism or worse. Governments must assess how to help the population at large, rather than make matters worse,” he says.

And Dr Buckley worries that these websites “are only as good as the data that is fed into them and there are very real risks that they will either give people a false sense of ‘safety’ from the virus or they will demonise people and places unfairly.”

“It seems as though as the traffic ramps up and the cases increase then there’s a real danger of the site becoming out of date, leading to the possibility of increased risks of exposure,” he adds.

Experts also worry that releasing data like this could lead to privacy concerns.

Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent privacy researcher and advisor, says “upon inspection of a selection of these sites, you get the impression of how detailed the information is at times. You can imagine that information such as gender, detailed age, times with approximate hours of visiting physical locations, are pretty identifiable.”

There are also calls for governments around the world to consider their use of smartphone location data and how much information on people’s routines are made public.

The three Chinese government-owned telecoms companies, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, have all encouraged people to request logs of their movements captured using location data from their smartphones. 

These text messages listing the cities and regions people have visited can then be used to prove where they have been over the past two weeks.

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says “you’re opening a can of worms if you do that.”

“The implications for individual privacy are enormous,” he says. “Do people realise what they’re signing up for? It’s all been plotted out for the world to see.”

For now, the continued spread of coronavirus has fuelled curiosity and concern, with people in South Korea and China continuing to watch the disease spread on their smartphones.

Organisations like the World Health Organisation are closely monitoring coronavirus’ spread, while privacy experts are now also increasingly looking on with a sense of concern.


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