Digital Contact Tracing: Large-scale Geolocation Data as an Alternative to Bluetooth-based Apps' Failure

Abstract

The currently deployed contact-tracing mobile apps have failed as an efficient solution in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. None of them has managed to attract the number of active users required to achieve an efficient operation. This urges the research community to re-open the debate and explore new avenues that lead to efficient contact-tracing solutions. This paper contributes to this debate with an alternative contact-tracing solution that leverages already available geolocation information owned by BigTech companies with very large penetration rates in most countries adopting contact-tracing mobile apps. Moreover, our solution provides sufficient privacy guarantees to protect the identity of infected users as well as precluding Health Authorities from obtaining the contact graph from individuals.