One Year After Release, Despite Error Reports... The Quarantine App Lost Its Way

Dozens to Hundreds of Departure Alerts Daily
Stress from Warning Sounds for Responsible Officials
Government "Aiming to Launch New App in Second Half of the Year"

[Asia Economy Reporters Donghoon Jeong and Jeongyun Lee] Seo Jaeyoung (33, pseudonym) suffered additional distress from constant exit alerts on the self-quarantine application (app) while undergoing self-quarantine after contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case. Seo said, "I reported the errors multiple times to the app management team and the responsible public officials, but the errors persisted." Public officials in charge of self-quarantine cases are also exhausted. A public official from the Chungnam region said, "The location information errors ringing dozens or hundreds of times a day significantly interfere with our main duties," adding, "Since this area has many foreign workers, communication with self-quarantined individuals is difficult, causing many challenges in responding to app errors."

According to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and users of the self-quarantine safety protection app, the app has repeatedly shown errors such as 'location exit' alerts even though users did not leave their quarantine locations continuously for a year since its initial release in March last year. Despite multiple reports of errors by users and the media, no improvements have been made. The app was developed to monitor the location and health status of those quarantined after confirmed contact with COVID-19 cases. Those entering from overseas or who had contact with confirmed cases are required to install the app and report self-diagnosis and quarantine status. It was introduced partly for 'control' purposes to prevent quarantine location breaches during the self-quarantine period. The app has been downloaded over 500,000 times on Android devices.

Warning message for leaving the quarantine location in the 'Self-Quarantine Safety Protection' app

According to app users, discrepancies frequently occur between the GPS (Global Positioning System) detected location of the quarantined individual and the designated quarantine location. Exit warning messages appear, and responsible public officials attempt to verify the self-quarantined person's location via phone calls. Some users report stress from the 'location exit' warning sounds ringing dozens of times a day. These errors stem from incorrect GPS recognition. GPS has an average error margin of about 100 meters, and in areas with dense high-rise buildings such as apartments and office towers, signal reflections can increase errors to several hundred meters. Expert B, who develops location-based apps, said, "GPS-based apps inevitably have location error margins," adding, "The system should not react immediately to such errors but rather compensate by reducing the error, but it seems the improvement speed for an app used by hundreds of thousands is slow."

Regarding these errors, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety stated, "The app was hastily developed last March to monitor the sudden increase in confirmed cases and self-quarantined individuals, and since it uses GPS optimized for outdoor location tracking, errors are frequent," adding, "We are continuously working on location correction features. We plan to develop and distribute a new version of the app targeting the second half of this year."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.