Conversations on COVID: Tracing contacts while preserving privacy with Brown University Professor

One of the keys to safely ending COVID-19 lockdowns across the country is contact tracing — identifying people who have been exposed to the virus to prevent them from spreading it. A Brown University computer scientist is part of an international research team trying to enable contact tracking with smartphones in a way that preserves everyone’s privacy.

“I think that this time when people are dying and everybody’s stuck at home, it’s tempting to say, ‘well let’s give up privacy; let’s give up human rights; let’s give up democracy’ — anything to stop this. But we need to not yield to that impulse. We can do automated tracing, which could really improve outcomes for containing this disease, while preserving privacy.”

Anna Lysyanskaya, a professor of computer science and a cryptography expert, is working on an MIT-based project called PACT: Private Automated Contact Tracing. The team is developing a system that uses the Bluetooth signals that smartphones exchange all the time to track which devices have come in close contact to each other. The system makes it possible to notify people that they may have been in contact with an infected person, but without revealing any private information to other individuals, the government, health care providers or cellular service companies. Lysyanskaya says that a system like this helps to strike a balance between the need to track infections and the need to preserve people’s privacy.

Read the full story, including an interview with Dr. Lysyanskaya, here.