BU-Trace: A Permissionless Mobile System for Privacy-Preserving Intelligent Contact Tracing
This addresses privacy and convenience issues in contact tracing for public health during pandemics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing technologies like QR codes and NFC.
The authors tackled the problem of digital contact tracing for COVID-19 by proposing BU-Trace, a permissionless mobile system that uses QR code and NFC technologies to protect user privacy and improve convenience, achieving a system that operates without requesting location or other privacy-related permissions.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused an unprecedented health crisis for the global. Digital contact tracing, as a transmission intervention measure, has shown its effectiveness on pandemic control. Despite intensive research on digital contact tracing, existing solutions can hardly meet users' requirements on privacy and convenience. In this paper, we propose BU-Trace, a novel permissionless mobile system for privacy-preserving intelligent contact tracing based on QR code and NFC technologies. First, a user study is conducted to investigate and quantify the user acceptance of a mobile contact tracing system. Second, a decentralized system is proposed to enable contact tracing while protecting user privacy. Third, an intelligent behavior detection algorithm is designed to ease the use of our system. We implement BU-Trace and conduct extensive experiments in several real-world scenarios. The experimental results show that BU-Trace achieves a privacy-preserving and intelligent mobile system for contact tracing without requesting location or other privacy-related permissions.