Digitalising body and privacy under the Covid-19 Pandemic

Bioinformation, that is, information that is derived from biological organisms or that describes biological processes and lives (Parry and Greenhough 2018), is at the centre of contemporary economies, processes of state security and international cooperation, as well as criminal justice systems. Bioinformation is produced, exchanged, traded, mined, repurposed, amassed and destroyed with uneven public oversight and through mechanisms that are often out of view. Bio information accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The chapter examines digital tracking coronavirus bodies and privacy in South Korea. This bio information marks transitions from the body to data, biological substance to information, and archives to datasets. These transformations promoting logics of tracking virus bodies and forms of governmentality that become opaque and out of reach for most citizens make it essential for anthropology to engage conceptually and empirically with the multiple values that tracking body under coronavirus accrues as it travels from bodies to data in particular databases, archives and infrastructures.