I can't trust the authors when they start with a false premise: "The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly raised the need for technological solutions capable to trace contacts of people and provide location-based analytics". No, it has not created any such "need". "It's for yours and _everyone's_ health" is the most common premise used to reduce privacy and increase control over people. No!
Yes. There is a demonstrable lack of need. Contact tracing has not worked and will not work for covid. As new variants emerge that spread faster, this will become even more true. The best measures against covid appear to be old fashioned common sense practices. Pay attention to yourself and if you’re sick stay home. Don’t cough, sneeze or breath on each other unnecessarily. Stand a bit further apart. Be outdoors more…
As an Australian, I can say with certainty contract trace does work for COVID. It is one of the tools Australia uses to keep it's cases near 0.
There are caveats of course. Contract tracing's big brother is the lock down, where everybody is forced to isolate. It's the big brother because all contact tracing does is limit the lock down to those who have been exposed. They are found by tracing the contacts of existing infections.
Contact tracing achilles heel it is labour intensive. It works beautifully, right up until the number of new infections overwhelm the labour force available to do the contact tracing. So in Australia contact trace is always paired with an initial lock down, to give the contact tracers a head start. Delta in particular with its R0 of 7 can easily overwhelm the man power before within a week if you don't stop it dead. (This has now happened in our most libertarian state, forcing said libertarian state into the longest and invasive lock downs we've seen in Australia.)
In Australia contact tracing was done with no technological help whatsoever at the start. It was all via interviews. Now we have QR codes everywhere, which you are by law required to scan when directed to do so by the Chief Medical Officer, which is invariable while there is local transmission. This is done as a force multiplier of course - it both raises the number of infections needed to overwhelm the system, and speeds up shutting down the outbreak. Time is money, and in this case the money is measured literally in billions.
The sad and bizarre outcome is those QR codes are very invasive - we had a much better solution available. If you visit places that must have QR codes (which broadly is any business), you by law must take a smart phone with the contact tracing app installed. You have to enter all your details into the contact tracing app. When you scan the QR code it uploads the exact time and place to government servers. The uploaded information has already been leaked beyond it's intended use.
In contrast the original bluetooth tracing app (and probably this 5G solution) was designed to never leak your position unless you become a close contact of a person contacted by the contact tracers. They were far more private and resistant to abuse. Yet Apple and Google effectively made them impossible to use, due to erstwhile "privacy considerations". And in doing so, forced the adoption of solutions where, as far as I can tell, privacy was never a design consideration.