Covid-19: Scientists develop Bluetooth tracing system, with privacy at heart

A new Bluetooth contact tracing system for detecting Covid-19 proximity, has been developed by a team of scientists and data privacy experts, including from UCL. The DP-3T tracing system, which is presented openly for public scrutiny in a new White Paper , works at scale and has been developed to the highest privacy standards, ready to deploy into an app. The system enables epidemiologists to analyse the spread of the pandemic, while fully respecting individual rights to privacy and ensuring no personal data ever leaves an individual's device, and is not centralised in a cloud server: meaning it is not able to be repurposed for anything other than public health. It is proposed as one of the protocols for the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing project (PEPP-PT). Data rights and regulation lecturer, Dr Michael Veale (UCL Laws), said: "There are a lot of concerns about Bluetooth tracing being administered centrally by governments, particularly in countries that have weaker privacy laws and concern for human rights. We have developed a practical solution that could help tell someone when they come into contact with someone that has tested positive for Covid-19, while at the same time ensuring that the user's information never leaves their phone." The system would work whereby people who have tested positive for Covid-19 are authorised to upload random, constantly changing identifiers they have been emitting via Bluetooth using the app. Individuals that have the app, and have been in proximity to that person, compare downloaded random identifiers to the ones they have collected using their own devices.