Privacy and contact tracing efficacy

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, public health authorities and software designers considered the possibility that smartphones could be used for contact tracing to control disease spread. Smartphone-based contact tracing was attractive in part because it promised to allow the tracing of contacts that might not be reported using traditional contact tracing methods. Comprehensive contact tracing raises distinctive privacy concerns, however, that have not been previously explored. Contacts outside of an individual’s ordinary social network are more likely to be privacy-sensitive, making fear that such contacts will be disclosed a potential disincentive to adoption of smartphone contact tracing. Here, we modify the standard SEIR infectious disease transmission model to incorporate contact tracing and perform a series of simulations aimed at studying the importance of tracing socially distant (and potentially privacy-sensitive) contacts. We find that, for a simple model network, ensuring that distant contacts are traced is surprisingly unimportant as long as contact tracing adoption is sufficiently high. These results suggest that policy-makers designing contact tracing systems should be willing to trade off comprehensiveness for more widespread adoption.

Where has privacy gone?

“…It is the process of identifying all people with whom a Covid-19 patient has come in contact in the last two weeks. Contact tracing is a recognized method to reduce the infection spread and it is made easier nowadays thanks to smartphones [31]. People carried them everywhere so that their frequented places and pthe eople with whom they met could be recorded and analysed by health officials [32].…”

Empowering Users: Towards User-Centric Consent Mechanisms in Single Sign-On Systems

“…Centralization in managing identities and authentication, while simplifying the login process, also increases the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information [10]. The IdP, in traditional SSO systems, has the ability to track all the Service Providers (SPs) a user visits, potentially compromising user privacy [11]. Additionally, collusive SPs could exploit the centralized nature of SSO to create a comprehensive profile of a user's online activities by linking their identities across different platforms [12].…”