South Korea To Test AI-Powered Facial Recognition To Track COVID-19 Cases (reuters.com) 12
South Korea will soon roll out a pilot project to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition and thousands of CCTV cameras to track the movement of people infected with the coronavirus, despite concerns about the invasion of privacy. Reuters reports: The nationally funded project in Bucheon, one of the country's most densely populated cities on the outskirts of Seoul, is due to become operational in January, a city official told Reuters. The system uses an AI algorithms and facial recognition technology to analyze footage gathered by more than 10,820 CCTV cameras and track an infected person's movements, anyone they had close contact with, and whether they were wearing a mask, according to a 110-page business plan from the city submitted to the Ministry of Science and ICT (Information and Communications Technology), and provided to Reuters by a parliamentary lawmaker critical of the project.
The Bucheon official said the system should reduce the strain on overworked tracing teams in a city with a population of more than 800,000 people, and help use the teams more efficiently and accurately. [...] The Ministry of Science and ICT said it has no current plans to expand the project to the national level. It said the purpose of the system was to digitize some of the manual labour that contact tracers currently have to carry out. The Bucheon system can simultaneously track up to ten people in five to ten minutes, cutting the time spent on manual work that takes around half an hour to one hour to trace one person, the plan said.
The Bucheon official said the system should reduce the strain on overworked tracing teams in a city with a population of more than 800,000 people, and help use the teams more efficiently and accurately. [...] The Ministry of Science and ICT said it has no current plans to expand the project to the national level. It said the purpose of the system was to digitize some of the manual labour that contact tracers currently have to carry out. The Bucheon system can simultaneously track up to ten people in five to ten minutes, cutting the time spent on manual work that takes around half an hour to one hour to trace one person, the plan said.
Can that really work well with masks? (Score:1, Interesting)
It'll be interesting to eee if CCTV resolution is good enough to do facial recognition on a large crowd of people mostly wearing masks.
Very expensive in the future (Score:1)
To remove all these cameras, might as well leave them up.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems overkill to me (Score:1)
As far as trust of the gov't, we can generally apply a scale similar to:
1. Over-trust
2. Healthy but practical skepticism
3. Nearly complete distrust
This seems to fall under #1. Do they really need mass cameras to track alleged Covid violators? And what do they do with all those cameras after the pandemic? It looks like a solution looking for a problem, or an excuse to snoop.
Re: (Score:1)
> Who said they were violators?
If they are not looking for violators, then why snoop?
> That's just the bias you inserted so you could claim government bad.
I'm not claiming they are bad, only that one should avoid giving them unnecessary power because human nature is they will abuse it if not kept in check.
Surveillance state (Score:2)
SARSCoV2 / Covid-19 make a convenient excuse to build the foundation of a surveillance state. The virus will fade with time, but the surveillance will remain.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What sort of surveillance state are you not living in? or Maybe you're just fooling yourself as to the realities of your phone and its capabilities?
Re: (Score:2)
That's the funny part about the complaints; they already have the cameras. They're already looking at them for this purpose. But right now, they're using humans. Who can also use the cameras for other purposes on the side. With an AI, it will just do this one thing, and less people will be looking at the images. Less chances to misuse the images.
Wrong end (Score:2)