Pandemics:
how can contact tracing be performed in a privacy-respecting manner?
Problem Statement:
Combating the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic requires the rapid identification of people who have come into recent contact with confirmed cases of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. This allows for timely interventions such as evacuation and disinfection of spaces and for assistance in locating people who have been close to a carrier or have been exposed to the virus, so that they too can be appropriately tested or treated. With almost half of the world’s population carrying a device capable of GPS tracking, location trails – timestamped logs of an individual’s location can be created. By checking the user’s location trails, one can identify the places a carrier has visited and in turn, locate other citizens who have been in close proximity to the diagnosed carrier, thus acting to reduce the spread of COVID-19. How can we achieve this location matching between a carrier and another citizen in a privacy-preserving way?
Tasks:
The student will use PHP and JavaScript in order to achieve the following:
- Parse JSON files to view the trajectories of users while moving around the city,
- Identify cases where carriers were in close proximity to other citizens,
- Achieve the above goals in a way that does not reveal information about the locations of the users involved.
The big challenge of the tasks above is (c) where some way of maintaining privacy needs to be achieved. Some interesting ideas are listed in this paper: “Assessing Disease Exposure Risk with Location Data: A Proposal for Cryptographic Preservation of Privacy”. (Available@Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.14412)
Work:
10% Theory, 70% Programming, 20% Writing
Contact:
Andreas Kamilaris (a.kamilaris@utwente.nl)