Contact Tracing Apps for COVID-19: Access Permission and User Adoption

2020 7th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC) Pub Date : 2020-11-05 DOI:10.1109/BESC51023.2020.9348327

Amal Awadalla Mohamed Ali, A. ElFadl, M. Abujazar, S. Aziz, Alaa A. Abd-alrazaq, Zubair Shah, S. Belhaouari, M. Househ, T. Alam

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引用次数: 5

Abstract

Contact tracing apps are powerful software tools that can help to control the spread of COVID-19. In this article, we evaluated 53 COVID-19 contact tracing apps found on the Google Play Store in terms of their usage, rating, access permission, and user privacy. For each app we identified the country of origin, number of downloads, and access permissions to further understand other attributes and ratings of these apps. Our results showed that contact tracing apps had low overall ratings and nearly 40% of them were requesting “dangerous access permission” including access to storage, media files, and camera permissions. We discovered that user adoption rates were inversely correlated to access permission requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this article summarizes the most extensive collection of contact tracing apps for COVID-19. We recommend that future contact tracing apps be more transparent in permission requirements and justify permission requests to preserve the app users' privacy.

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COVID-19接触者追踪应用:访问权限和用户采用

接触者追踪应用程序是功能强大的软件工具，可以帮助控制COVID-19的传播。在本文中，我们评估了b谷歌Play商店中发现的53个COVID-19接触者追踪应用程序，包括它们的使用情况、评级、访问权限和用户隐私。对于每款应用，我们都明确了原产国、下载量和访问权限，以便进一步了解这些应用的其他属性和评级。我们的研究结果显示，接触追踪应用的总体评分较低，近40%的应用要求“危险访问权限”，包括访问存储、媒体文件和相机权限。我们发现用户采用率与访问权限要求呈负相关。据我们所知，本文总结了COVID-19最广泛的接触者追踪应用程序集合。我们建议未来的接触者追踪应用程序在权限要求方面更加透明，并证明权限请求是合理的，以保护应用程序用户的隐私。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

2020 7th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC)

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