GoCoronaGo: Privacy Respecting Contact Tracing for COVID-19 Management

TL;DR

This paper presents GoCoronaGo, a privacy-conscious digital contact tracing app for COVID-19, detailing its design, deployment, and potential research challenges in managing virus spread while respecting privacy.

Contribution

It introduces the GoCoronaGo app with unique design choices, deployment experience, and discusses open research challenges in digital contact tracing and analytics.

Findings

Successfully deployed to over 1000 users at IISc Bangalore

Provides insights into privacy-preserving contact tracing design

Highlights research opportunities in temporal network analytics

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is imposing enormous global challenges in managing the spread of the virus. A key pillar to mitigation is contact tracing, which complements testing and isolation. Digital apps for contact tracing using Bluetooth technology available in smartphones have gained prevalence globally. In this article, we discuss various capabilities of such digital contact tracing, and its implication on community safety and individual privacy, among others. We further describe the GoCoronaGo institutional contact tracing app that we have developed, and the conscious and sometimes contrarian design choices we have made. We offer a detailed overview of the app, backend platform and analytics, and our early experiences with deploying the app to over 1000 users within the Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore. We also highlight research opportunities and open challenges for digital contact tracing and analytics over temporal networks constructed from them.