CONTACT-TRACING SOLUTION WITH HIGH PRIVACY PROVISIONS USING READILY AVAILABLE DATA FROM LARGE TECH COMPANIES:

There is an increasing demand for digital solutions that allow realizing proximity-tracing in order to detect people that have been in contact with individuals tested positive. The most adopted approach is developing new mobile apps that rely in Bluetooth to perform the referred contact-tracing. Recently, some experts have claimed that digital contact-tracing solutions will be only effective if around 60% of the citizens in a country install the contact-tracing app. Therefore, despite all brilliant solutions that are being proposed, there is a serious risk failure since managing to attract 60% of the citizens has never done before in the short-term required in  the COVID-19 context.

While Bluetooth contact-tracing solutions evolve, we propose that location data from large tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc could be use to accomplish contact-tracing. The penetration of those companies in western countries is very high, and may definitely complement BlueTooth contact-tracing towards achieving the 60% goal. Although GPS may not be enough for tracing direct contacts (it would be enough for indirect contact tracing that accord to some studies may also cause a significant number of infections), smartphone location is nowadays very advanced and use multiple techniques to reduce the accuracy. Google reports that their smartphones can geolocate user with an accuracy of 1.5-2m if they are in range od 3 geolocated WiFI signals. In addition, smartphones use embedded sensors like gyroscopes, accelerometers, etc to increase the geolocation precision. Therefore, we believe it is a must testing the potential of Large Techs companies location data for contact tracing since it is the only real source of data at this moment.

In addition, Large Techs companies have the moral obligation of helping the society in this crisis, since we are only asking OUR DATA that they use to make huge amounts of money. Our project proposes a solution for an efficient cooperation between public administrations and large techs companies ensuring high privacy provisions for the users. That means each entity will not disclose private information under their control. Large Tech companies will not be able to identify who are the users tested positive, while public administration will neither have access to the location of the users nor to the contact graph of an infected user. The only information exchanged for contact-tracing purposes will be Mobile IDs of the users.

This project is being developed by the Telematic Engineering Department of UC3M. If you have interest in this technology, you can contact the main researcher, Ángel Cuevas, acrumin [at] it.uc3m.es (acrumin[at]it.uc3m.es)