Re: COVID-19 contacts tracker (Re: a brief pondering)

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

>     Il 16/04/2020 09:18 Rob Sayre <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
>     It's not clear that any of these tracker proposals actually harm privacy. Certainly the government in most places can get this data from phone companies and correlate it themselves.
> 
No, because covid19-oriented contact tracing requires much more precision than what can be provided by any location data that the operators can trace through their cellular networks; location data are unsuitable to determine a one-time contact with accuracy (though they could still be used to find longer term correlations between individuals).

This is why contact tracing is generally being done on the phone via Bluetooth low energy, with a contact range of ~10m (the other reason is that this approach allows you to trace contacts even if the cellular and/or GPS connectivity is unavailable, for example inside big buildings or underground).

Many European countries already put out calls for proposals in the past weeks and are near to selecting an app for this purpose, with the European Commission working on an EU-interoperable approach; the dominant mobile OS vendors already came up with a joint standard API to support the above; so it is unclear what the IETF could add to this in such a short timeframe.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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