Submitted by A. Lorenz on Wed, 22/04/2020 - 15:07
As governments, companies and academics race to develop post-pandemic contact tracing apps, concerns are growing over privacy and transparency issues. More than 300 academics from around the globe have released a joint statement calling for citizen privacy to be at the heart of any technical solution. They argue that digital solutions to the COVID-19 crisis should not, via mission creep, be allowed to lead to surveillance of society.
The open letter has been released in the wake of growing concern over a proposal from the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing group which favoured a closed, proprietary standard for contact tracing that relies on storing data centrally.
Trust & Technology members Dr Jat Singh and Dr Jennifer Cobbe, together with Prof Jon Crowcroft, all members of the Dept of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge University, are among the UK signatories.
