Carmela Troncoso
More info
- Affiliation
- EPFL, Lausanne
- Known for
- DP-3T, decentralised contact tracing (2020)
The Spanish researcher who led the effort to keep pandemic contact-tracing apps from becoming surveillance registries.
Troncoso earned her PhD at KU Leuven on anonymity systems and traffic analysis, and since 2017 has run the SPRING lab at EPFL in Lausanne. In spring 2020, with governments across Europe wanting tracing apps within weeks, she pulled together the research consortium behind the DP-3T protocol.
Phones swap rotating random identifiers over Bluetooth, and matching against infected users happens on the device, so no central server ever learns who met whom. The rival centralised proposal, PEPP-PT, wanted the opposite. Google and Apple built their Exposure Notification framework on the same decentralised principle, which in practice settled the argument — a rare case of privacy research arriving before the deployment rather than after it.