{"id":253886,"date":"2026-04-30T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/30\/digital-contact-tracing-and-privacy\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T04:46:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T08:46:34","slug":"digital-contact-tracing-and-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/30\/digital-contact-tracing-and-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital contact tracing and privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digital contact tracing and privacy<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.unc.edu\/discover\/the-right-balance-digital-contact-tracing-and-privacy\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-04-30 03:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.unc.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

The news came minutes before Carolina hosted four experts in a discussion on COVID-19 contact tracing apps.<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It was the perfect beginning to Data Privacy in the Era of COVID-19 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Jay Swaminathan<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Contact tracing defined<\/h4>\n

Modern contact tracing sprang from thinking such as physician John Snow\u2019s ideas on germ theory during London\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Practices such as Snow\u2019s became broadly institutionalized as public health departments emerged in the 1800s, according to Jim Thomas, associate professor of epidemiology at Carolina\u2019s Gillings School of Global Public Health. \u201cWhen we refer to contact tracing today, it is in the context of what the government is doing to control disease in its population,\u201d Thomas said.<\/p>\n

\"Jim<\/p>\n

Jim Thomas<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":253887,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.unc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/contact_tracing_cropped.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253886"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253888,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253886\/revisions\/253888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}