PANDA: policy-aware location privacy for epidemic surveillance

AbstractIn this demonstration, we present a privacy-preserving epidemic surveillance system. Recently, many countries that suffer from COVID-19 crises attempt to access citizen's location data to eliminate the outbreak. However, it raises privacy concerns and may open the doors to more invasive forms of surveillance in the name of public health. It also brings a challenge for privacy protection techniques: how can we leverage people's mobile data to help combat the pandemic without scarifying location privacy. We demonstrate that we can achieve this by implementing policy-based location privacy for epidemic surveillance. Our system has three primary functions for epidemic surveillance: people flow monitoring, epidemic analysis, and contact tracing. We provide an interactive tool allowing the attendees to explore and examine the usability of our system: (1) the utility of location monitor and disease transmission model estimation, (2) the procedure of contact tracing in our systems, and (3) the privacy-utility trade-offs w.r.t. different policy graphs. The attendees will find that we can have the high usability for epidemic surveillance while preserving location privacy.