Contact Tracing Apps: statement from scientists and researchers

In a joint statement on Contact Tracing, hundreds of scientists and researchers from across the globe warn that technological solutions to fight coronavirus might “allow unprecedented surveillance of society at large”.

Signatories underline that research has demonstrated that solutions based on sharing geolocation (GPS) to discover contacts lack sufficient accuracy and carry privacy risks because the GPS data is sent to a centralised location. Therefore Bluetooth-based solutions are “strongly preferred when available”.

However, even some Bluetooth-based proposals would enable government or private sector surveillance by enabling large scale data collection on the population. “[S]olutions which allow reconstructing invasive information [such as social graph: who someone has physically met] about the population should be rejected without further discussion”.

On the other hand, highly decentralised systems allow anonymous matching between users who have the disease and those who do not have it on the non-infected users’ phones.

Signatories warn against the collection of private information on users in the context of the Google/Apple partnership -to enable Bluetooth operations. Such an initiative is needed to develop Contact Tracing Apps but should not lead to privacy violation.

In short, scientists and researchers urge all countries to apply the following principles:

-Contact tracing Apps must only be used to support public health measures for the containment of COVID-19. The system must not be capable of collecting, processing, or transmitting any more data than what is necessary to achieve this purpose.

-Any considered solution must be fully transparent. The protocols and their implementations, including any sub-components provided by companies, must be available for public analysis. The processed data and if, how, where, and for how long they are stored must be documented unambiguously. Such data collected should be minimal for the given purpose.

-When multiple possible options to implement a certain component or functionality of the app exist, then the most privacy-preserving option must be chosen. Deviations from this principle are only permissible if this is necessary to achieve the purpose of the app more effectively, and must be clearly justified with sunset provisions.

-The use of contact tracing Apps and the systems that support them must be voluntary, used with the explicit consent of the user and the systems must be designed to be able to be switched off, and all data deleted, when the current crisis is over.