Researchers from the Telematic Engineering Department Univesidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Spain have started a project that aims to provide 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 on COVID-19. 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  of failure to reach this tasget at short notice. 

While Bluetooth contact-tracing solutions evolve, researchers propose that location data from large tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. could be used to accomplish contact-tracing. The penetration of those companies in Western countries is very high, and could 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 according to some studies may also cause a significant number of infections), smartphone location is nowadays very advanced and accurate. Google has reported that their smartphones can geolocate users with an accuracy of 1.5-2m if they are in range of 3 geolocated Wifi-signals. In addition, smartphones use embedded sensors like gyroscopes or accelerometers to increase the geolocation precision. Therefore, testing the potential of large tech-companies location data for contact tracing is believed to be a must.

In addition, large tech-companies have the moral obligation of helping the society in this crisis. The researchers involved in the UC3M project propose a solution for an efficient cooperation between public administrations and large tech-companies ensuring high privacy provisions for the users. That means each entity will not disclose private information under their control. Neither will large tech-companies be able to identify who are the users tested positive, nor will the public administration have access to the location or the contact graph of an infected user. The only information exchanged for contact-tracing purposes will be the mobile IDs of the users.

If you are interested in this research, you can contact the researchers of the project in the COVID-19 forum by clicking here.