COVID-19 Contact Tracing: Eight Privacy Questions Explored
This work tackles privacy risks in public health technology, but it is incremental as it builds on prior research without introducing new methods or data.
The paper addresses privacy concerns in COVID-19 contact tracing apps by analyzing three toy protocols and proposing eight assessment questions, framing the issue as a game design problem for analysis.
We respond to a recent short paper by de Motjoye et el. on privacy issues with Covid-19 tracking. Their paper, which we discuss here, is structured around three "toy protocols" for the design of an app which can maximise the utility of contact tracing information while minimising the more general risk to privacy. On this basis, the paper proceeds to introduce eight questions against which they should be assessed. The questions raised and the protocols proposed effectively amount to the creation of a game with different categories of players able to make different moves. It is therefore possible to analyse the model in terms of optimal game design.