South Korea launches real-time stalker tracking app as cases surge

In a control centre in eastern Seoul, a probation officer watches a dot move across a screen—a man closing in on a woman. The distance between them shrinks from 845 metres to 792. On the woman's phone, the same map loads. The officer calls: the stalker is approaching, don't panic, help is coming. The man is a stand-in, the scenario staged, but the system tracking him is real.

Since late June, survivors of stalking in South Korea—overwhelmingly women—have been able to open an app and watch a tagged perpetrator move in real time once they come within a 2-kilometre radius. When the distance closes to one kilometre, an alert goes to police and probation authorities, who call the victim. Before this, survivors received only a text message with a distance figure, no map, no direction, no sense of where danger was coming from. About 400 people are now enrolled in the scheme.

The app exists because stalking in South Korea has become a crisis. Reports have tripled in the four years since a dedicated stalking law passed in 2021, reaching 44,687 cases in 2025. Around 80 per cent of victims are women. The system arrived in the wake of killings that shook the country. In March, prosecutors allege a man wearing an ankle tag blocked his former partner's car as she left work in Namyangju, north-east of Seoul, broke the window with a drill, and stabbed her. A court had already barred him from approaching her after she reported him for stalking. He is on trial for murder, which he denies, claiming diminished responsibility. The justice ministry, which runs the tagging system, knew exactly where he was at all times. The police handling her stalking case did not.

Two control centres, in Seoul and Daejeon, now process around 19,000 alerts a day, covering more than 5,000 people under electronic monitoring for offences ranging from sexual violence to murder. Most alerts are filtered out by staff, but about 300 a day are serious enough to dispatch a probation officer. Each officer manages more than 20 monitored people—a ratio the ministry says it is trying to halve as numbers grow. On the screens in front of them: live lists of danger and caution alerts, each subject's description, even the battery level of their tag.

Yoon Hyun-bong, who directs the Seoul centre, describes the difference the app makes. "Waiting with no idea what's happening is deeply distressing," he says. "A distance alone doesn't tell you which direction he's coming from, but seeing it on a map, you know where to hide." A woman named Anna, who fled a violent former partner, spent two weeks moving between state-run shelters before being given a panic-button watch that alerts police and sends her location. Even with the watch, she says, it never gave her peace of mind. "I didn't know where he was at any time," she said. "What if I took it off for a shower, and that just happened to be the time he broke into my house?"

But the app's arrival has surfaced deeper questions about what it means to put the burden of vigilance on survivors. Sujeong Kim, director of the women's human rights counselling centre at the Korea Women's Hotline, acknowledges that knowing a perpetrator's whereabouts can be more helpful than not knowing. Yet she questions whether giving survivors that information also shifts responsibility for their safety onto them. "If the authorities did their job properly, who would want to check it themselves?" she asks. Victims may end up checking wherever they go to see whether the perpetrator has entered the radius, adding to the psychological weight of living under threat, feeling they must always be ready to flee.

There is also a structural problem. The app works only if a court has ordered electronic tagging, and in stalking cases that is rarely sought. Police apprehended 29,404 people on stalking charges across 2024 and 2025. Over the same period they made 1,187 applications to tag suspects. Courts granted only 427. Whether the new app changes how often tagging is sought or granted remains unclear. The justice ministry says tagging serves as a minimum safety measure because not every suspect can realistically be removed from society.

For Kim, none of this addresses the root cause. "The reason this problem doesn't get solved is gender discrimination," she says. "Treating it as unimportant, as a private matter, as something the victim can sort out on her own—that all comes from gender discrimination, too."