5 Privacy and consent
A global virus pandemic is starting to abate, and different organizations are scrambling to put together ‘back-to-work’ plans to allow employees to return to their workplace after several months in lockdown at home. Toward this end, organizations are evaluating a (fictional) machine learning-based mobile app named TraceBridge. It supports the return to the office by collecting and modeling location traces, health-related measurements, other social data (e.g. internal social media and calendar invitations among employees), and administrative data (e.g. space planning information and org charts), to facilitate digital contact tracing: the process of figuring out disease-spreading interactions between an infected person and others. Is TraceBridge the right solution? Will organizations be able to re-open safely or will the employees be homebound for even more seemingly unending months?