[enitihas]

But didn't South Korea too have aggressive location tracking and even made those details public?

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y

So not exactly CCP style lockdown but not a 2019 style free society either. They did make the hard choices necessary to got it in control. But it wasn't as simple as more testing.

[summerlight]

Preserving privacy may inherently contradict with public interest coming from aggressive contact tracing. This is really unfortunate, but the S.Korea case could be even worse if adequate CDC agents were not granted with the authority to aggregate/join arbitrary private data (very likely against the subject's will).

This was especially important for early actions taken by S.Korea's CDC since a single super-spreader (#31) had contacts with thousands(!) of people within just 2~3 days. I'm 99% sure that Europe and America also have similar cases, but just remains unveiled because they couldn't really do the same thing with the given authority. S.Korea was in a similar situation during the MERS outbreak but now they passed a law to allow such actions.

IMHO, this trade-off is no brainer. The cost is can be controlled/minimized while the economical/societal damages caused by full lockdown is not. And yes, this is also not 2019 style free society.

[paganel]

Italy has already started doing something similar with cell-tower data for people located in Lombardy. There's this article in Italian from a few hours ago [1] with the president of the Lombardy region saying that more than 40% of the population (I guess that from the region as a whole, or only from Milano, I'm not so sure yet) had walked/moved for more than 300 meters outside their place of residence in the last 24 hours, all this information supposedly based on that cell-tower data I mentioned earlier.

[1] https://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/03/18/news/coronav...

[lostmsu]

I expected privacy to kill people here ever since tech companies refused to name people on campuses who tested positive when they were among the first cases in the area. Keep your priorities in order folks.