Two THaW researchers participated as panelists in a recent online panel discussion about contact tracing, with an emphasis on the security and privacy aspects. The video is now available.

“The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for contact tracing, an effort to retroactively discover and inform all the persons who had recent contact with an infected person. Traditional methods are labor-intensive and inherently limited by human memory. Smartphone apps have been proposed to proactively record contacts, for retrospective notifications to those who may have been proximate to someone later discovered to be infected. There are, however, inherent privacy and cybersecurity risks posed by such technologies, and the same technologies could be abused for purposes other than public health. It is thus essential for contact tracing technologies to be designed and deployed with the utmost care and transparency.”