GoCoronaGo: Privacy Respecting Contact Tracing for COVID-19 Management

Simmhan, Yogesh; Rambha, Tarun; Khochare, Aakash; Ramesh, Shriram; Baranawal, Animesh; George, John Varghese; Bhope, Rahul Atul; Namtirtha, Amrita; Sundararajan, Amritha; Bhargav, Sharath Suresh; Thakkar, Nihar; Kiran, Raj

The COVID-19 pandemic is imposing enormous global challenges in managing the spread of the virus. A key pillar to mitigation is contact tracing, which complements testing and isolation. Digital apps for contact tracing using Bluetooth technology available in smartphones have gained prevalence globally. In this article, we discuss various capabilities of such digital contact tracing, and its implication on community safety and individual privacy, among others. We further describe the GoCoronaGo institutional contact tracing app that we have developed, and the conscious and sometimes contrarian design choices we have made. We offer a detailed overview of the app, backend platform and analytics, and our early experiences with deploying the app to over 1000 users within the Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore. We also highlight research opportunities and open challenges for digital contact tracing and analytics over temporal networks constructed from them.