Surveying and Analyzing Privacy Issues in Contact tracing apps

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic continues to represent widespread panic, and global initiatives are focused on treating and limiting its spread. Contact tracing promises to help fight this pandemic through early detection of possible contagion events. In this context, several mobile applications have been proposed to try to identify the contact cases of a person who tested positive for COVID-19. In total, 32 countries have developed such applications and are using them as a strategy that may flatten the pandemic curve. These applications can also be adopted to combat future communicable diseases among humans. However, most of these applications do not fully respect the preservation of the privacy of users. That’s why, the adoption of these applications is being held back in many countries. Motivated by the need to protect user privacy, we analyze some of these applications. We demonstrate that they collect sensitive data which represents a violation of user privacy. At the end, we present several major recommendations that can serve as a reference, contributing to the development of privacy-preserving contact tracing applications.