Proximity tracing applications for COVID-19: data privacy and security

Since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has had a strong impact on the health of the world population. Tracing the contacts of infected people is one of the main strategies for controlling the pandemic. Given the high rates of contagion, which makes difficult an effective manual tracing, multiple initiatives arose for developing digital proximity tracing technologies. In this paper, we discuss in depth the security and personal data protection requirements that these technologies must satisfy, and we present an exhaustive and detailed list of the various applications that have been deployed globally. In particular, we identify potential threats that could undermine the satisfaction of the analyzed requirements, violating hegemonic personal data protection regulations.