  Containment, the key strategy in quickly halting an epidemic, requires rapid
identification and quarantine of the infected individuals, determination of
whom they have had close contact with in the previous days and weeks, and
decontamination of locations the infected individual has visited. Achieving
containment demands accurate and timely collection of the infected individual's
location and contact history. Traditionally, this process is labor intensive,
susceptible to memory errors, and fraught with privacy concerns. With the
recent almost ubiquitous availability of smart phones, many people carry a tool
which can be utilized to quickly identify an infected individual's contacts
during an epidemic, such as the current 2019 novel Coronavirus crisis.
Unfortunately, the very same first-generation contact tracing tools have been
used to expand mass surveillance, limit individual freedoms and expose the most
private details about individuals. We seek to outline the different
technological approaches to mobile-phone based contact-tracing to date and
elaborate on the opportunities and the risks that these technologies pose to
individuals and societies. We describe advanced security enhancing approaches
that can mitigate these risks and describe trade-offs one must make when
developing and deploying any mass contact-tracing technology. With this paper,
our aim is to continue to grow the conversation regarding contact-tracing for
epidemic and pandemic containment and discuss opportunities to advance this
space. We invite feedback and discussion.
