The need for privacy with public digital contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic
Yoshua Bengio, Richard D. Janda, Yun William Yu, Daphne Ippolito, Max Jarvie, Dan Pilat, Brooke Struck, Sekoul Krastev, Abhinav Sharma · The Lancet Digital Health · 2020
Digital contact tracing applications represent a powerful yet controversial strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing has important challenges, not limited to recall bias and delays in communicating with high-risk contacts.1 Digital technologies are already increasingly used in the context of health-care delivery and clinical trials.2 Due to the considerable strain on public health institutions, digital contact tracing through mobile phones is being used or explored in a growing number of countries despite concerns raised over individual privacy and state surveillance.