By Yun Suh-young
Police will be able to track the location of some victims making emergency calls without the callers’ consent from November.
Last week, the National Assembly passed a bill on the protection and utilization of location information and the new law will take effect Nov. 15.
Until now, police have been unable to track the location of callers without their consent, even in an emergency.
A recent murder case in Suwon, however, accelerated the passage of the bill as the need for a quick police response to an emergency call was raised by the public following the failure of officers to rescue a victim in her late 20s.
On April 1, a Chinese-Korean man mutilated the body of the woman after kidnapping, raping and murdering her. Before she was killed, she called 112 Crime Report Center but officers failed to locate her position, resulting in the brutal homicide.
The chief of the National Police Agency resigned due to the failure of officers to take appropriate action.
Since the murder, the public’s interest in location tracking devices and services and ways to protect themselves and their families has grown. According to police, many have called the agency over the past month asking them to track family members and friends who are missing.
The new law will allow police to freely track the locations of the callers even without their consent, speeding up rescue procedures.
The location tracking, however, has several limitations. It is limited to the caller, which means the caller’s location can only be traced by police if the caller is the victim. If a witness calls on someone else’s behalf, the consent of the witness is required. If a third person calls on the victim’s request, the police may track the location of a victim only if they have the victim’s consent.
The police, however, may not track the location when family members such as a spouse, children, or siblings of the victim, make the call, or if a third person makes the call on behalf of someone attempting suicide, a runaway, or a patient suffering from dementia.
The police played down concerns about manipulation or misuse of personal information, saying that the law only allows them to track a caller’s location in an emergency.