Contact Tracing Mobile Apps for COVID-19: Privacy Considerations and Related Trade-offs

By Hyunghoon Cho, Daphne Ippolito, Yun William Yu. arXiv.org, 2020

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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

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78bcf659c7764369a3044e829791bd4e42e3d559

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring the adoption of telemedicine and virtual software for care of outpatients during and after COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “Findings from recent studies [25, 32] revealed that 94% of participants highlighted data protection regulations as one of the factors that limits adoption of virtual software platforms in health sector.”
DHP Framework: Digital Health Passports Using Blockchain - Use case on international tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic (2004, background): “cations are used by a sufﬁciently high proportion of the population. Due to the use of personal devices, DCT applications pose several issues with regards to the personal privacy of their users [27], [28] and as a result public concerns were raised. Several DCT protocols and applications have been d”
Leveraging Data Science to Combat COVID-19: A Comprehensive Review (2020, background): “We note that one critical challenge in the above apps is protecting user privacy [169], [170].”
COVI White Paper (2020, background): “Privacy is a serious concern for both manual contact tracing and automatic tracing solutions [18, 19, 20, 11].”
Acceptability of App-Based Contact Tracing for COVID-19: Cross-Country Survey Study (2020, background): “Research on the privacy implications of app-based contact tracing, and the potential solutions to these concerns, is currently underway [12,16,17].”