Digital contact tracing and privacy
Digital contact tracing and privacy
https://www.unc.edu/discover/the-right-balance-digital-contact-tracing-and-privacy/
Publish Date: 2026-04-30 03:00:00
Source Domain: www.unc.edu
The news came minutes before Carolina hosted four experts in a discussion on COVID-19 contact tracing apps.
Apple and Google had just made their operating codes available to governments and public health authorities so they could create smartphone apps to notify people who have come in contact with someone diagnosed with the coronavirus.
It was the perfect beginning to Data Privacy in the Era of COVID-19 — Contact Tracing: Privacy vs. Protection, a recent webinar hosted by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, as countries have launched contact tracing apps and almost all of the issues discussed have been in the news.
Jay Swaminathan
Jay M. Swaminathan, GlaxoSmithKline Distinguished Professor of Operations in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, moderated the webinar. The experts discussed the implications of contact tracing apps, concerns about personal data privacy, impediments to voluntary use and a possible constitutional mandate to use such apps.
Contact tracing defined
Modern contact tracing sprang from thinking such as physician John Snow’s ideas on germ theory during London’s 1854 cholera epidemic. Snow traced deaths to use of a public water pump, which he had closed to help stem the spread of the disease.
Practices such as Snow’s became broadly institutionalized as public health departments emerged in the 1800s, according to Jim Thomas, associate professor of epidemiology at Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “When we refer to contact tracing today, it is in the context of what the government is doing to control disease in its population,” Thomas said.
Jim Thomas
Institutional contact tracing involves trained workers contacting individuals who may have been exposed during a public health outbreak such as cholera, H1N1 flu or sexually transmitted diseases. Tracers interview people who have tested positive, advise them to quarantine themselves, then warn others who came into contact with them of their exposure and point those with…
