Do we need a contact tracing app?

Leonardo Maccari; Valeria Cagno

doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2020.11.007

Do we need a contact tracing app?

Comput Commun. 2021 Jan 15:166:9-18. doi: 10.1016/j.comcom.2020.11.007. Epub 2020 Nov 19.

Authors

Leonardo Maccari¹, Valeria Cagno²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Environmental Science, Informatics and Statistics, University of Venice, Italy.
² Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, University of Geneva Medical School, Switzerland.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to shed some light on the usefulness of a contact tracing smartphone app for the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the basics of contact tracing during the spread of a virus, we contextualize the numbers to the case of COVID-19 and we analyze the state of the art for proximity detection using Bluetooth Low Energy. Our contribution is to assess if there is scientific evidence of the benefit of a contact tracing app in slowing down the spread of the virus using present technologies. Our conclusion is that such evidence is lacking, and we should re-think the introduction of such a privacy-invasive measure.

Keywords: COVID-19; Contact tracing; Pandemic; Privacy; Proximity tracing.