Privacy Preservation of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Data

ABSTRACT

Big data are everywhere. Examples of big data include contact tracing data of patients who contracted coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). On the one hand, mining these contact tracing data can be for social good. For instance, it helps slow down the spread of COVID-19. It also helps people diagnosed with COVID-19 get referrals for services and resources they may need to isolate safely. On the other hand, it is also important to protect the privacy of these COVID-19 patients. Hence, we present in this paper a solution for privacy preservation of COVID-19 contact tracing data. Specifically, our solution preserves the privacy of individuals by publishing only their spatio-temporal representative locations. Evaluation results on real-life COVID-19 contact tracing data from South Korea demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our solution in preserving the privacy of COVID-19 contact tracing data.