%0 Journal Article %D 2021 %T Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment %A Mirco Nanni %A Andrienko, Gennady %A Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo %A Boldrini, Chiara %A Bonchi, Francesco %A Cattuto, Ciro %A Chiaromonte, Francesca %A Comandé, Giovanni %A Conti, Marco %A Coté, Mark %A Dignum, Frank %A Dignum, Virginia %A Domingo-Ferrer, Josep %A Ferragina, Paolo %A Fosca Giannotti %A Riccardo Guidotti %A Helbing, Dirk %A Kaski, Kimmo %A Kertész, János %A Lehmann, Sune %A Lepri, Bruno %A Lukowicz, Paul %A Matwin, Stan %A Jiménez, David Megías %A Anna Monreale %A Morik, Katharina %A Oliver, Nuria %A Passarella, Andrea %A Passerini, Andrea %A Dino Pedreschi %A Pentland, Alex %A Pianesi, Fabio %A Francesca Pratesi %A S Rinzivillo %A Salvatore Ruggieri %A Siebes, Arno %A Torra, Vicenc %A Roberto Trasarti %A Hoven, Jeroen van den %A Vespignani, Alessandro %X The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society. %8 2021/02/02 %@ 1572-8439 %G eng %U https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-020-09572-w %! Ethics and Information Technology %R https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09572-w %0 Journal Article %J Nat Commun %D 2015 %T Returners and explorers dichotomy in human mobility %A Luca Pappalardo %A Filippo Simini %A S Rinzivillo %A Dino Pedreschi %A Fosca Giannotti %A Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo %X The availability of massive digital traces of human whereabouts has offered a series of novel insights on the quantitative patterns characterizing human mobility. In particular, numerous recent studies have lead to an unexpected consensus: the considerable variability in the characteristic travelled distance of individuals coexists with a high degree of predictability of their future locations. Here we shed light on this surprising coexistence by systematically investigating the impact of recurrent mobility on the characteristic distance travelled by individuals. Using both mobile phone and GPS data, we discover the existence of two distinct classes of individuals: returners and explorers. As existing models of human mobility cannot explain the existence of these two classes, we develop more realistic models able to capture the empirical findings. Finally, we show that returners and explorers play a distinct quantifiable role in spreading phenomena and that a correlation exists between their mobility patterns and social interactions. %B Nat Commun %V 6 %8 09 %G eng %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms9166