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from the your-tinfoil-hat-won't-save-you-this-time dept.
A law requiring the mass installation of spyware on teenagers' smartphones suggests that the frightening level of population control exercised by its neighbours in "Best Korea" has rubbed off on the Republic's administrators in Seoul.
The Republic of South Korea's Communications Commission, a media regulator modeled after the United States' FCC, now requires telecom companies and parents to ensure a monitoring app is installed whenever anyone under the age of 19 receives a new smartphone.
The measure will only slowly come into force over the next few years as it doesn't require old smartphones be updated, although AP reports that most schools in South Korea sent out letters to parents encouraging them to install the software anyway.
One particular monitoring app called Smart Sheriff was funded and developed by the South Korean government with the declared intent of blocking children's access to pornography.The app, however, effectively allows parents "to monitor how long their kids use their smartphones, how many times they use apps and which websites they visit.
Some send a child's location data to parents and issue an alert when a child searches keywords such as 'suicide', 'pregnancy' and 'bully' or receives messages with those words", reports AP.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by CirclesInSand on Wednesday May 20 2015, @01:59PM
This is just how Koreans are. It is the most Confucian country on earth, and some of the main tenets of Confucianism are fidelities. In practical terms, that translates into "do whatever your parents/teachers/government/males tell you no matter what". Koreans are very authoritarian.
The students spend 16 hours a day in school, 5 days a week half the time and 6 days a week the other half of the time. They spend their entire youth inside public school classrooms.
In April 2014 a Korean ferry, the MV Sewol, capsized and began sinking with over 400 secondary students on board. The captain made an announcement for the students to return to their quarters and stay there. The students actually listened-- they stayed in their quarters while the boat was tipped over and filling with water. While the captain escaped the ship and lived, about 300 students sat in their rooms and just drowned just because the captain told them to.
One of the crew members, a cafeteria worker named Park Ji-young [youtube.com], defied the captains orders and told as many students as she could to abandon ship. She drowned in the process, but if she hadn't told the students to get to out, they would have just listened to the captain and died too.
Koreans have a horribly demented respect for authority. Telling youths to install spyware on their phones is almost tame by comparison. Blaming this on North Korean influence is absurd.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @02:57PM
It might actually explain how North Korea's system was able to survive that long.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 20 2015, @05:14PM
The problem with the ferry example is how a panic movement could hinder the ability of he crew to save the ship, and cost more lives. Sure, in retrospect, the captain was as wrong as wrong can be. But if you're an uninformed teenager in a scary situation, the words of the experienced people have to bear some weight.
Harry Potter is cute fantasy, but disobeying in the face of mortal danger is actually more likely to get someone killed. This counter-example has to be weighed against thousands of situations where "the captain said do this, don't ask why" actually saves lives.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Wednesday May 20 2015, @08:47PM
I agree with you that more often than not "captain said to do this, don't ask why" is a good policy. Or doctor, or medic, or your lawyer.
But when you are in a room, in a tipped over boat, with water rising in it, and only staying because the captain said to, that's extreme. Peer enforcement plus authoritarian culture was a bad recipe.