Mauritius Data protection poorly understood in Mauritius 🥺

Mauritius counted 186 positive COVID-19 cases including 7 deaths as at 3 April.

With the rise of cases I notice a lot of people calling the authorities to release personal information of patients having tested positive for the novel coronavirus. People think the release of such personal information will make contact tracing a much quicker exercise.

I've had arguments with people on Facebook. I even reported people to the Cybercrime Unit for breaching the Data Protection Act by sharing the personal information of COVID-19 patients.

People argue that contact tracing will be faster if personal information of patients is released. Many are citing the example of how South Korea released information to accelerate contact tracing. Unfortunately, people do not read or enquire properly.

South Korea has an experience dealing from previous epidemics, such as the MERS outbreak in 2015. Their medical personnel and relevant authorities were able to quickly step up with containment plans.

South Korean authorities did not release personal information of patients. It is wrong to assume that.

Legislation enacted since then gave the government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who test positive to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person.
Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Information shared by the South Korean authorities were anonymized.