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In the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, many countries across the world have developed new health surveillance technologies using digital tools and communication data to monitor and manage confirmed and suspected carriers of the virus. This article demonstrates the growing centrality of mobile network operators in managing global health crises through a case study of South Korea’s epidemic governance. In South Korea, KT, one of the country’s three telecommunications companies, has been actively developing and investing in health surveillance platforms since 2015, promoting that its big-data-based surveillance and ICT infrastructures may prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Conducting a situational analysis of archival materials, I document the process through which such mobile network operators emerge as essential producers of the data infrastructures that shape the understanding and management of public health emergencies. The article also addresses the sociocultural implications of such private technology corporations’ capturing of emergency power. In the end, I argue that Korea’s public health surveillance systems are increasingly constructed within the capitalist logic of the telecom industry, mainly via ‘platformization’ – a shift that offers telecom firms to transform from network to platform operators by extracting and aggregating subscribers' data. The case analyzed here demonstrates how granting such extraordinary authority to ICT companies during national emergencies becomes routinized, and even instrumentalized for economic purposes.

Tracking bodies in question: telecom companies, mobile data, and surveillance platforms in South Korea’s epidemic governance