A Study on Contact Tracing Apps for Covid-19: Privacy and Security Perspective

Abstract

To support the manual contact tracing methods of Covid-19, countries and big companies like Apple and Google are busy developing several contact tracing applications. The purpose of digital contact tracing apps is to accelerate existing traditional face to face interview method which can control the pandemic effectively and rapidly. A major concern is whether consumers will be willing to download, install, and use the contact tracing applications because of the debate it created about its main attribute like security, privacy concern, system framework, data processing, location measurement. In this paper we discuss the contact tracing apps and its different architecture, then we analyze the framework in term of security, privacy concern and privacy policy. We reported 47 contact tracing applications which are from 28 countries worldwide, with several others expected to be roll out later. We found that 23 percent of contact tracing apps currently implemented do not provide privacy policy in their documentation. We believe that these comprehensive evaluation and specific suggestions will lead to creation and implementation of solutions towards Covid-19 and support governments and mobile development industries in creating safe and privacy conserving apps for contact tracing solutions.