Contact Tracing App Privacy: What Data is Shared by Non-GAEN Contact Tracing Apps

Abstract

We describe the data transmitted to backend servers by the contact tracing apps now deployed in France (TousAntiCovid), Australia (CovidSafe), Singapore (TraceTogether), US/Florida (CombatCovid), Israel (HaMagen), India (Aarogya Setu) with the aim of evaluating the privacy of these contact tracing apps as actually deployed. To the best of our knowledge, the measurements we present are the first public data of this sort for the French, Australian, Israeli, Indian and Florida apps. We find that TousAntiCovid and CovidSafe are generally well-behaved with regard to privacy. TraceTogether and CombatCovid make extensive use of Google Firebase services which means that that there are two main parties involved in handling data transmitted from these apsp, namely Google and the health authority operating the app itself. HaMagen is well-behaved for uninfected users of the app but GPS location data associated with infected is publicly published on the HaMagen server. Aarogya Setu, with >160M users, is found to have a number of serious privacy issues, including silent upload of logged location data.