VenueTrace: a privacy-by-design COVID-19 digital contact tracing solution
Ruoxi Sun, Wei Wang, Minhui Xue, Gareth Tyson, Damith Chinthana Ranasinghe · 2020
Rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is making traditional manual contact tracing challenging; in response, digital contact tracing mobile apps have been developed by the software industry and promoted by governments and health authorities worldwide. However, deploying contact tracing apps across a population at scale have raised many privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a venue-access-based contact tracing solution, VenueTrace, which preserves user privacy by designs by: (i) enabling the contact tracing of venue-to-user, instead of user-to-user; (ii) avoiding information exchanges between users; and (iii) ensuring no private data is exposed to back-end servers, while enabling proximity contact tracing.