Sensors, meters and cameras inside and outside will hum in around-the-clock surveillance. The technology-laden “smart city” being built on the southern coast of South Korea epitomizes the daily bargain for most of humanity: the relinquishing of personal data and privacy in exchange for convenience, order and safety.

Every wrinkle of life will be monitored — except maybe fleeting thoughts and daydreams. Son’s boy, Logan, will grow up very differently from his millennial parents. They are gauging the wonders and misgivings of rapidly advancing technology, but Logan’s generation is being born into an already digitally interconnected reality where big data and artificial intelligence will shape his everyday existence long before he’s old enough to contemplate notions of privacy or give his consent….

The trade-offs of this emerging world were foreshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, when cities and countries decided on how far to infringe on personal freedoms to protect public health. Some of the nations that pried most deeply into private lives to track infections managed to keep deaths low, curb rampant spread and prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed.

South Korean authorities relied on a panoptic software they had been developing to manage “smart city” projects — a dashboard to collect and analyze data to improve urban life. The platform was quickly repurposed into an epidemiological tool….

“The pandemic marks a real serious inflection point for a lot of this…. Who decides when COVID has gone away? If it’s something that never really truly goes away, those technologies and those systems may never truly go away either,” said Jathan Sadowski, a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Australia. “As history shows, we very rarely go back to the moment before. Once new doors have been opened, people are reticent to close them.”

Read more:

Kim, V. (2021, December 9.) Who’s watching? How governments used the pandemic to normalize surveillance. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-09/the-pandemic-brought-heightened-surveillance-to-save-lives-is-it-here-to-stay