Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing: current solutions and open questions

TL;DR

This paper reviews current privacy-preserving contact tracing solutions for COVID-19, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and proposes a research agenda for more effective and privacy-aware contact tracing methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing solutions and outlines open questions and future research directions in privacy-preserving contact tracing.

Findings

Current solutions have trade-offs between privacy and effectiveness.

Many solutions face challenges in user adoption and data security.

Open questions include balancing privacy with public health needs.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a unique challenge for the world to find solutions, ranging from vaccines to ICT solutions to slow down the virus spreading. Due to the highly contagious nature of the virus, social distancing is one fundamental measure which has already adopted by many countries. At the technical level, this prioritises contact tracing solutions, which can alert the users who have been in close contact with the infected persons and meanwhile allow heath authorities to take proper actions. In this paper, we examine several existing privacy-aware contact tracing solutions and analyse their (dis)advantages. At the end, we describe several major observations and outline an interdisciplinary research agenda towards more comprehensive and effective privacy-aware contact tracing solutions.