The past few months have taught us an important lesson: Were bad at handling highly contagious diseases.
For the moment, the main question is, how do we stop the spread of the virus?
For states, the choice is between health and the economy.
Most governments have chosen the former.
But even though our lives will never return to its former state, humanity will eventually overcome the coronavirus.
The options will then shift to choosing between health and privacy.
We already have the tools that can help to fight the spread of diseases such as COVID-19.
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But the power of technology goes beyond that, and it can serve evil purposes as well.
The server can then notify those people, instruct them to self-quarantine, and prioritize them for testing.
This kind of contact tracing is vital to stopping the spread of viruses.
There are many other benefits to such a system, lets call it the health-tracker app.
It can also warn users to avoid areas frequented by infected persons.
Some companies have already developedAI-powered solutionsthat have predicted the spread of COVID-19 with remarkable accuracy.
Manylarge tech companies are already doinglocation trackingsometimeswithout you knowing about itfor commercial purposes.
Its a conscious choice you make between privacy and convenience.
Breaking the law can earn you a fine or maybe get you some jail time for compromising public health.
Theprivacy-friendlyhealth tracker is composed of a mobile program and a server.
The mobile app generates a unique anonymous random token at regular intervals, say every minute.
Devices that are within range and have theprivacy-friendlyhealth tracker installed to receive and store the tokens.
These tokens comprise the devices collocation database.
Furthermore, theres no information to indicate whether two tokens come from the same user.
The program periodically polls the server for the list of infected tokens and compares them against its collocation database.
In case of a match, the user will be warned of a possible collocation with an infected person.
The user can then take the necessary measures, such as consulting with medical experts for the next steps.
The authors of the paper acknowledge that this is not a perfect solution.
As such, the proposed ideas are intended to complement (not substitute!)
effective prevention techniques such as social/physical distancing.
What I especially like about the solution offered by the Boston University researchers is its simple and minimalist structure.
This could even improve its security, preventing bad actors from flooding servers with bad data.
The effectiveness of these kinds of solutions depends on their mass adoption rate.
