Study: South Korea’s Privacy Tech Laws May Be More Effective Than Stay At Home Orders

Speaker 1: 00:00 The shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on San Diego's economy. SANDAG reports, the taxable sales in the San Diego region were down nearly 2.3 billion between February and April 20, 20 other countries around the world have been successful in slowing and even stopping the spread of the virus while allowing businesses to continue to operate as normal. You see San Diego economist Musab Lee says South Korea is efforts to use technology to inform the public about confirmed Corona virus infections, help keep its numbers down and lessen the economic impact of the pandemic. Lee spoke to KPBS science and technology reporter Shalina Shalani. She started by asking about South Korea strategy. Speaker 2: 00:47 Okay, so first of all, South Korea strategy can be summarized by three tests, testing, tracing, and treatment, but even with the enormous, the resources to put on the steel, it is tricky to find out or a symptomatic impacted the paper. One other key innovation on the Korean strategy was public disclosure of the come from the cases information. So Korean citizen got the text message containing the information of the recently confirmed cases, including the places pasted by then. So then the citizens could change their commuting behavior based on that information. So our research found that the people change their behavior based on the information more during the weekend and more by the funeral population. And then they saved some more life with a minimum economic cost. Speaker 3: 01:53 So the, the key point in your research is about the public disclosure of this data. What was the South Korean government's reasoning behind doing this? And what were the results you talked about? The number of lives lost being lesson and economic loss. Also be less being lessened. Tell us about that. Speaker 2: 02:14 Uh, let me provide you more background. So Korea has experienced the largest outbreak of the Merus in 2015. So it was the largest outside of middle East Korea's reaction back then was not great. So after then the Korea changed the law, the infectious disease, the prevention of law, so that the Korean CDC could use the credit card information, the stipend data, and so on under the national emergency. So this contact tracing or the public with is cruiser what's possible under the social agreements or surveillance. So then that was a beneficiary in terms of saving more light. But at the same time, there is the concern about the privacy. It's very natural concern, but I think the Korea found kind of the Bight balance between privacy and the public's needs to be informed about risk. Speaker 3: 03:28 Do you think that this type of strategy could work here and why was South Korea uniquely set up to do this? Speaker 2: 03:39 Okay. So I should first say that privacy is very important human rights, but that's not absolutely right. The privacy could be restricted in accordance with the registration. So I do recommend the U S to implement the same strategy as of today, but it is time to start the conversation about it. So if we can find a social consensus, we can think about the following the Korean strategy in the case of the second way of a Kobe or for the next Uber virus. So that's what Korea did. So Korea made a social consensus after experiencing the Marist outbreak in 2015, without that law, the Korean strategy couldn't be implemented. So what I suggest is that we can start from the smaller scale. So that could be one County that could be one company, or that could be one university. So we can find a social agreement of the surveillance. We can basically start from that small scale implementation preventing for the second way or the another Dover biter. Speaker 3: 05:05 So it does make sense how the government was able to flatten the curve, reducing the number of cases with the strategy, but where does the economics come into this? Speaker 2: 05:18 Oh, under the lockdown paper cannot go outside, but under the public disclosure paper can still go well and go to the low risk neighborhoods. And there is also the selection by the type of the people do not have a population who pays the higher, the hex risk. They are gonna decide to stay at home under the public disclosure. And then the working age, the population singing, the Bennett people have to go inside higher than the postal door, getting outside, getting outside, I'm going to go out and then work there and then take the leisure there. So that's where the benefit of the public disclosure comes from. And that's where the economics kicks in. People are making the ration of behavior based on their benefit, cost comparison. And under the public disclosure still, they can go to the neighborhood with the lower risk of the infection. Speaker 4: 06:19 Yeah, Speaker 3: 06:19 got it. So it's kind of a two pronged approach. If you avoid a lockdown, then people can still go out and spend their money and go to low risk neighborhoods. Well, those are who are more at risk and avoid those places where they could contract coronavirus. That makes sense. So the last thing I want to ask is with technology, there's always this question of access, right? You know, there are people who have access to cell phones, and then there are people who don't have access to them. Is this something that you noticed in your research? Speaker 2: 06:51 That's very interesting question. So that has the huge, uh, implication, because I believe the thing technology cannot be applied to low income countries, the low income countries that people may not have a smartphone so that, uh, the CDC cannot send the text message. And at the same time, if people do not use the credit card and then the cellphone, it is impossible for the CDC to do the proper context racing in Korea. It was possible to, because almost everyone has the cell phone, the smartphone these days. And at the same time, the people are using the credit card more than cash. Ideally in terms of the technical technological capacity, the Korean strategy can be applied to many other developed countries, but it is customizable whether we can apply the same technology in low income countries, especially in rural area Speaker 3: 07:53 when sub I can't thank you enough for talking with us. I've been speaking to Munson Lee and economist at UC San Diego, whose research was just published in the national Bureau of economic research. Thank you so much. Speaker 2: 08:05 Thank you so much.