COVID-19 Contact Tracing: Current States and Future Directions

Contact tracing has become a key tool for public health officials to effectively combat the spread of new diseases, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, this process is either manual or semi-manual and often very time consuming and inefficient. It largely relies of human memory and cannot be scalable to tackle pandemic like COVID-19. Researchers and practitioners around the world have turned into the technology based approaches to provide a scalable solution. Smartphone and associated digital technologies have the potential to provide a better solution due to its high level of penetration coupled with mobility. However, information like location or proximity associated with other personal data are very sensitive private information and can be used by the states to do surveillance over their citizen. Researchers have proposed different contact tracing protocols to overcome or limit those concerns. In this paper, we have critically reviewed these protocols and apps to identify the strength and weakness of each approaches. Finally, we have pen down our recommendations to make contact tracing mechanism more universally inter-operable and privacy preserving.