Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment
Creators: name: Nanni, Mirco
name: Andrienko, Gennady
name: Barabási, Albert-László
name: Boldrini, Chiara
name: Bonchi, Francesco
name: Cattuto, Ciro
name: Chiaromonte, Francesca
name: Comandé, Giovanni
name: Conti, Marco
name: Coté, Mark
name: Dignum, Frank
name: Dignum, Virginia
name: Domingo-Ferrer, Josep
name: Ferragina, Paolo
name: Giannotti, Fosca
name: Guidotti, Riccardo
name: Helbing, Dirk
name: Kaski, Kimmo
name: Kertesz, Janos
name: Lehmann, Sune
name: Lepri, Bruno
name: Lukowicz, Paul
name: Matwin, Stan
name: Jiménez, David Megías
name: Monreale, Anna
name: Morik, Katharina
name: Oliver, Nuria
name: Passarella, Andrea
name: Passerini, Andrea
name: Pedreschi, Dino
name: Pentland, Alex
name: Pianesi, Fabio
name: Pratesi, Francesca
name: Rinzivillo, Salvatore
name: Ruggieri, Salvatore
name: Siebes, Arno
name: Trasarti, Roberto
name: Hoven, Jeroen van den
name: Vespignani, Alessandro
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Computers and Society (cs.CY)
subject: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the phase 2 of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens' privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens' "personal data stores", to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates - if and when they want, for specific aims - with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society.
description: Revised text. Additional authors