Public health systems in the United States have the ability to conduct manual contact tracing; however they do not have the capacity to trace individuals at the scale needed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, work is underway to develop contact tracing applications that use the mobile tracking technologies (e.g., GPS, Bluetooth) in personal devices to gather, store, and retrieve an individual?s location and contact history. This project assesses the technological limits of mobile location tracking applications being used in COVID1-19 for contact tracing by public health officials to mitigate COVID-19. At the same time this research will address questions of geospatial privacy, including 1) notice-and-consent to location data collection, and 2) risk of personal identification. The project will provide data and results that are needed to develop more effective contact tracing systems. The databases and publications created by this research will contribute to an informed public debate about the role contact tracing should play during different phases of the pandemic.
As public health officials expand contact tracing systems in response to COVID-19, it is essential to know when and where those systems are likely to be most accurate. To meet these needs, this project will catalog and evaluate the contact tracking technologies as they are deployed and developed across the United States. Comparative studies across states will facilitate the identification of the technologies and practices that are most effective in different regional environments. More broadly, this research will fill the gap in geospatial privacy literature by addressing geospatial privacy of newly evolving mobile location tracking technologies and how these technologies can contribute to the health and welfare of sociey.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
