Anonymous collocation discovery: taming the coronavirus while preserving privacy
Files
First author draft
Date
2020, 2020
DOI
Authors
Canetti, Ran
Trachtenberg, Ari
Varia, Mayank
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
Ran Canetti, Ari Trachtenberg, Mayank Varia. 2020. "Anonymous Collocation Discovery: Taming the Coronavirus While Preserving Privacy.." CoRR, Volume abs/2003.13670, https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13670v4.
Abstract
Successful containment of the Coronavirus pandemic rests on the ability to quickly and
reliably identify those who have been in close proximity to a contagious individual. Existing tools
for doing so rely on the collection of exact location information of individuals over lengthy time
periods, and combining this information with other personal information. This unprecedented
encroachment on individual privacy at national scales has created an outcry and risks rejection
of these tools.
We propose an alternative: an extremely simple scheme for providing fine-grained and timely
alerts to users who have been in the close vicinity of an infected individual. Crucially, this is done
while preserving the anonymity of all individuals, and without collecting or storing any personal
information or location history. Our approach is based on using short-range communication
mechanisms, like Bluetooth, that are available in all modern cell phones. It can be deployed
with very little infrastructure, and incurs a relatively low false-positive rate compared to other
collocation methods. We also describe a number of extensions and tradeoffs.
We believe that the privacy guarantees provided by the scheme will encourage quick and
broad voluntary adoption. When combined with sufficient testing capacity and existing best
practices from healthcare professionals, we hope that this may significantly reduce the infection
rate.
Description
License
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.