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Research at 果冻影院 Laws was instrumental in developing contact tracing technology during the pandemic that protected people鈥檚 privacy.
It was clear all digital contact tracing approaches were vulnerable to privacy threats, but that centralised systems would involve greater risks, with the potential for abuse of data.
Dr Michael Veale (果冻影院 Laws) was the main legal researcher contributing to a groundbreaking project in this area, called Decentralised Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing Protocol (DP-3T).
Dr Veale worked with an international consortium of universities to facilitate notification of exposure to a COVID-positive individual without individuals being identifiable to anyone else. The new protocol used the idea of rotating codes, which meant tracing apps could notify people who may have been exposed to the virus, without having to know their identity.
The team鈥檚 work inspired Apple and Google鈥檚 approach to building decentralised proximity tracing capability into their operating systems, called 鈥楨xposure Notification鈥�.
It also led to the UK government abandoning its centralised app, and using a decentralised design instead based on the DP-3T protocol.
From its launch until its retirement in May 2023, the app had been downloaded over 31m times. This corresponds to ~64% of the adult population of England and Wales (although some may be re-downloads), and its use is thought to have averted around 594,000 cases of COVID-19.
At least 65 official national or regional COVID-19 contact tracing apps have since been developed globally, using the privacy-preserving technology, covering over 90% of smartphones and 372m people.
Read more on the 果冻影院 Research Impact website.听
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