Privacy Risk and Preservation For COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

Contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic is key to prevent the further spread of COVID-19. Countries and regions around the world have developed and deployed or are considering adopting contact-tracing software or mobile apps. While contact tracing apps and software play an important role in the pandemic, red flags have been raised regarding the privacy risk associated with contact tracing. In this short paper, we provide an overview on the GPS and Bluetooth based contact-tracing apps in the framework of both centralized and decentralized models, examine the associated privacy risk and the effectiveness of the privacy-preserving measures adopted in different apps.