Privacy Aware Contact Tracing by Exploiting Social Networks in Viral Disease Outbreaks

Hussain, A.; Luo, Y.; Ieee,

This paper studies the privacy protection of individuals in contact tracing using social network for the viral disease outbreaks such as novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Contact tracing has been proved effective in controlling the diseases outbreaks such as Ebola virus disease in Africa. We propose the privacy protection mechanism which can be used by social networks under the assumption that the external knowledge (friendship network) is publicly available. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the proposed mechanism and show that the algorithm improves the privacy of individuals. The synthetic and real data sets are used for experimental evaluations.