Contact Tracing Mobile Apps for COVID-19: Privacy Considerations and Related Trade-offs
arXiv:2003.11511
Abstract
Contact tracing is an essential tool for public health officials and local communities to fight the spread of novel diseases, such as for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Singaporean government just released a mobile phone app, TraceTogether, that is designed to assist health officials in tracking down exposures after an infected individual is identified. However, there are important privacy implications of the existence of such tracking apps. Here, we analyze some of those implications and discuss ways of ameliorating the privacy concerns without decreasing usefulness to public health. We hope in writing this document to ensure that privacy is a central feature of conversations surrounding mobile contact tracing apps and to encourage community efforts to develop alternative effective solutions with stronger privacy protection for the users. Importantly, though we discuss potential modifications, this document is not meant as a formal research paper, but instead is a response to some of the privacy characteristics of direct contact tracing apps like TraceTogether and an early-stage Request for Comments to the community. Date written: 2020-03-24 Minor correction: 2020-03-30
12 pages, 1 table, 1 figure
References in corpus (1)
Cited by in corpus (38)
- Epione: Lightweight Contact Tracing with Strong Privacy
- WiFiTrace: Network-based Contact Tracing for Infectious Diseases Using Passive WiFi Sensing
- From Personalized Medicine to Population Health: A Survey of mHealth Sensing Techniques
- TraceSecure: Towards Privacy Preserving Contact Tracing
- Assessing Disease Exposure Risk with Location Data: A Proposal for Cryptographic Preservation of Privacy
- ODT FLOW: A Scalable Platform for Extracting, Analyzing, and Sharing Multi-source Multi-scale Human Mobility
- Epidemic mitigation by statistical inference from contact tracing data
- How to Return to Normalcy: Fast and Comprehensive Contact Tracing of COVID-19 through Proximity Sensing Using Mobile Devices
- Digital tools against COVID-19: Framing the ethical challenges and how to address them
- Anonymous Collocation Discovery: Harnessing Privacy to Tame the Coronavirus
- Dissecting contact tracing apps in the Android platform
- Privacy Guidelines for Contact Tracing Applications
- An Empirical Assessment of Global COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications
- Review and Critical Analysis of Privacy-preserving Infection Tracking and Contact Tracing
- Quest: Practical and Oblivious Mitigation Strategies for COVID-19 using WiFi Datasets
- What Makes People Install a COVID-19 Contact-Tracing App? Understanding the Influence of App Design and Individual Difference on Contact-Tracing App Adoption Intention
- Reinforced Epidemic Control: Saving Both Lives and Economy
- Cross Hashing: Anonymizing encounters in Decentralised Contact Tracing Protocols
- Privacy-Preserving and Sustainable Contact Tracing Using Batteryless Bluetooth Low-Energy Beacons
- Flipping the Perspective in Contact Tracing
- TB-ICT: A Trustworthy Blockchain-Enabled System for Indoor COVID-19 Contact Tracing
- Privacy-Preserving Multi-Operator Contact Tracing for Early Detection of Covid19 Contagions
- A Privacy-preserving Mobile and Fog Computing Framework to Trace and Prevent COVID-19 Community Transmission
- Human Mobility during COVID-19 in the Context of Mild Social Distancing: Implications for Technological Interventions
- Short Paper: Privacy Comparison of Contact Tracing Mobile Applications for COVID-19
- PPContactTracing: A Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Protocol for COVID-19 Pandemic
- Hansel and Gretel and the Virus: Privacy Conscious Contact Tracing
- Social Distancing 2.0 with Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing to Avoid a Second Wave of COVID-19
- vContact: Private WiFi-based Contact Tracing with Virus Lifespan
- Digital Ariadne: Citizen Empowerment for Epidemic Control
- An Empirical Evaluation of Bluetooth-based Decentralized Contact Tracing in Crowds
- Second layer data governance for permissioned blockchains: the privacy management challenge
- Sentiment Analysis of Users' Reviews on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps with a Benchmark Dataset
- Quantifying the Privacy-Utility Trade-offs in COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
- Secure and Efficient Trajectory-Based Contact Tracing using Trusted Hardware
- A Tale of Two Countries: A Longitudinal Cross-Country Study of Mobile Users' Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Lens of App Popularity
- SNARKs to the rescue: proof-of-contact in zero knowledge
- Privacy-accuracy trade-offs in noisy digital exposure notifications