In the fight to combat the spread of COVID-19, governments
throughout the world have been considering the use of digital
contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing apps seek to interrupt the
onward transmission of the coronavirus by identifying and notifying
recent contacts of an infected person in an anonymous fashion.
Privacy issues have been central to the considerations of how such
technology should be implemented to achieve this important public
health objective with the least impact on the privacy of
individuals.
In some digital contact-tracing systems, location and identity
information may be sent to a central system for analysis, most
often operated by a government health organization. In others, the
systems are decentralized, where the users obtain information and
are invited to update their COVID-19 health status (positive test
results, for example). This decentralized contact-tracing
technology is generally described to work as follows:
