Privacy Risk and Preservation for COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Information Sharing

Presented for the Privacy Day Webinar 2021 sponsored by the American Statistical Association's Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality. Link to recording. Contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic is key to preventing the spread of COVID-19. Countries and regions around the world have developed and deployed contact-tracing software or mobile apps. While contact tracing plays an important role in the pandemic, red flags have been raised regarding the privacy risk associated with the contact tracing apps and software. In this talk, I provide an overview on the GPS and Bluetooth based contact-tracing apps in the framework of both centralized and decentralized models, examine their associated privacy risk, and the effectiveness of the privacy-preserving measures adopted in these apps. I will also share the ongoing work of my group on the application of formal privacy protection concepts and models to COVID data collection and sharing