Description
From the start of the COVID-19 public health emergency, many countries tried to control the coronavirus by introducing various countermeasures, including digital surveillance technology. In order to respect human rights, many Western countries and several international organisations established ethical guidelines because various government countermeasures for controlling infectious diseases may infringe upon individuals’ rights and their liberty (Starr, 1984; Choi, 2016). South Korea, which established itself by introducing strong and rapid measures such as widespread testing, digital tracking, and quarantine (Lee, 2020), decided to introduce electronic bracelets, namely the Safety Band Policy (SBP) in April 2020 to intensify the monitoring of those who break the quarantine rules. There were concerns and criticism over the policy threatening individuals’ fundamental rights and freedom, but the South Korean government continued with the implementation of the policy, and without any relevant ethical guidelines in place.
The aim of this study is to explore the ethical issues surrounding the SBP, evaluate the appropriateness of the policy based on ethical guidelines, and identify its limitations when adhering to the ethical guidelines proposed by international organisations or Western researchers in the evaluation of the policy implemented in an Asian country. In order to identify any issues related to the topic and evaluate the policy, documentary research involving a literature review and policy research was conducted. In particular, this study utilised the value-critical approach analysis (Rein, 1983) to evaluate the SBP based on the ethical guidelines proposed by WHO, UNICEF, and researchers from Oxford.
The findings revealed that the SBP is not a timely and necessary measure, lacks proportionality and regulations for data protection, and does not have sufficient legal grounding. Regarding the limitations of the application related to the ethical guidelines, the findings uncovered several points: firstly, the existing ethical factors (codes) of most ethical guidelines did not fully match the more practical problems associated with the SBP, so a few ethical elements had to be deleted or added based on its contextual use in Korea; secondly, most ethical guidelines did not reflect the architecture of technology in Korea (centralised, GPS based, and mandatory ones) that are different to those of western countries (decentralised, Bluetooth, and voluntary ones); thirdly, the kinds of digital technologies that had been used for controlling COVID-19 were different from country to country, so ethical guidelines or discourses regarding some of the technologies, such as electronic bracelets, did not exist. The findings imply that governments and researchers should scrutinise the level of systems for establishing ethical guidelines, or at least develop social debate regarding the ethical problems faced by each country or region to minimise the disparity regarding the ethical use of digital technology and to enhance international relations and cooperation.
Reference
Choi, E. K. (2016) Ethical responses to public health emergencies: The 2015 MERS
outbreak in South Korea, Korean Journal of Medical and Ethics, 19(3), pp.358-374.
Lee, M. S. (2020) Fragmentary thoughts about code of conduct and risk communication to prevent and control COVID-19 in Korea, 2020, Korean Journal of Health of Education and Promotion, 37(1), pp.103-107.
Rein, M. (1983) Value-critical policy analysis. In D. Callahan and B. Jennings (Eds.), Ethics, the social sciences, and policy analysis (pp. 83-111). New York: Plenum Press.
Starr. P. (1984) The social transformation of American medicine, New York: Basic Books.
