Abstract
The currently deployed contact-tracing mobile apps have failed as an efficient solution in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. None of them have managed to attract the number of active users required to achieve efficient operation. This urges the research community to re-open the debate and explore new avenues to lead to efficient contact-tracing solutions. In this paper, we contribute to this debate with an alternative contact-tracing solution that leverages the already available geolocation information owned by BigTech companies that have large penetration rates in most of the countries adopting contact-tracing mobile apps. Our solution provides sufficient privacy guarantees to protect the identity of infected users as well as to preclude Health Authorities from obtaining the contact graph from individuals.
Highlights
There is growing evidence that any strategy to effectively fight COVID-19 requires the efficient tracing of all contacts of infected individuals
We propose an alternative digital contact-tracing system based on the three previous key elements as fundamental design principles: 1. High adoption rate: We propose to use real-time location information from billions of people around the world that is already available in databases of large BigTech companies like Facebook (FB), Google, Apple, etc
We highlighted the main limitation of this approach— the lack of the sufficient adoption of such mobile apps, which has led every single attempt in this direction far to fail
Summary
There is growing evidence that any strategy to effectively fight COVID-19 requires the efficient tracing of all contacts of infected individuals. The main goal of this paper is to urge the research community to expand the definition of digital contact-tracing systems having in mind the following key elements: (1) avoid solutions that require massive adoption from scratch as experience has shown; (2) contact-tracing solutions must be designed to consider airborne transmission distance greater than two meters as a reference; (3) guide the design of the solutions setting the efficiency in fighting the pandemic (i.e., saving lives and mitigating the impact on the economy) as the primary goal instead of privacy. Some of these LPs, mainly Google and Facebook, have a very large rate of active users, over 50%, in many western countries
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