Cybersecurity expert Prof. Susan Landau’s valuable and insightful recent book, People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health, stresses that trust in government is essential to making contact tracing work for everyone. 

Contact tracing is a process for identifying, informing, and monitoring people who might have come into contact with a person who has been diagnosed with an infectious disease such as COVID-19.  It starts with a positive test. Public health officials then need to know who that person might have inadvertently infected. This requires tracking down anyone that person had contacted (was “close enough” for “long enough”) recently (14 days in the case of COVID). They can then be informed that they might have been infected and take measures to quarantine and monitor for symptoms. For example, restaurants initiate tracing by recording the name and phone number of one person in each party taking a table in the restaurant. 

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