Location Contact Tracing: Penetration, Privacy, Position and Performance

The recent COVID-19 pandemic changed radically the world and how people interact, move and behave. Following a lockdown that was imposed worldwide, although with different timing, Mobile Contact Tracing Apps (MCTA) were proposed to digitally trace contacts between individuals, while releasing gradually mobility constraints mandated to contain the disease spread. A general privacy concern on the use of GPS data shifted the efforts towards distributed applications, which use Bluetooth technology to trace proximity and potential infections. Nonetheless, GPS data would help more health operators to understand where hotbeds are, and to what extent the spread is progressing and at what pace. On top of these premises, in this work we take a closer look at the major pillars of MCTA, namely Penetration, Privacy, Position and Performance. We focus on (i) how the penetration rate affects the ability for a tracing applications to work, (ii) the proposal of a novel method of tracing, which build on the GPS technology, (iii) how the position of infections is beneficial to rapidly reduce the infection, and (iv) the discussion of the effects of such paradigm in different scenarios.