Contact tracing apps for COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges and potential

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread with increased fatalities around the world and has become an international public health crisis. Public health authorities in many countries have introduced contact tracing apps to track and trace infected persons as part of measures to contain the spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, there are major concerns about its efficacy and privacy with affects mass acceptance amongst a population. This review encompasses the current challenges facing this technology in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in neo-liberal societies. We explore and discuss the plausibility for abuse of user privacy rights as such apps collect private user data and can be repurposed by governments for surveillance on their citizens. Other challenges identified and discussed include ethical issues, security vulnerabilities, user behavior and participation, and technical constraints. Finally, in the analysis of this review, recommendations to address these challenges and considerations in the use of less invasive digital contact tracing technologies for future pandemics are presented. For policy makers in neo-liberal societies, this study provides an in-depth review of issues that must be addressed, highlights recommendations to improve the efficacy of such apps, and could facilitate mass acceptance amongst users.

National approaches for citizen data management in response to COVID-19: An overview and implications of contact tracing apps in 21 countries

“…Centralized apps store citizen data in a central server that is managed by the government, and so the government will have more control over citizen data. Decentralized apps store citizen data on their own mobile phones rather than a central server (which is usually managed by the government), and so citizens have more control over their own data (Akinbi et al, 2020;Cellan-Jones & Kelion, 2020).…”

“…While the biggest concern for this app is the privacy issue, Korean citizens seem to be fine with this invasion of personal information, for the sake of collective good. Kluth (2020) explained it in the cultural perspective and stated that this way of contact tracing would not fly in western countries; Akinbi et al (2020) analyzed in the perspective of law and argued that laws that approve the government to collect and publish citizens' personal data of the infected passes after the breakout of MERS in 2015.…”

“…code scanning as its sensor technology to collect citizens' personal information, including their name, I.D. number, phone number, home address, and their travel history(Akinbi et al, 2020;Chowdhury et al, 2020;Utz et al, 2020). While the official did not reveal the protocol of the mini-program, it uses a centralized framework that stored the data in a central server managed by the government.…”

Default options: a powerful behavioral tool to increase COVID-19 contact tracing app acceptance in Latin America?

“…To our knowledge, this is the first 1 The WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) use the term exposure notification apps. The term contact tracing apps with exposure notification follows current literature on mobile phone apps that can trace the close contacts of infected individuals (see Abeler et al, 2020;Abueg et al, 2020;Akinbi et al, 2020;Altmann et al, 2020;Anglemyer et al, 2020;Ayres et al, 2020;Bradshaw et al, 2020;Frimpong et al, 2020;Trang et al, 2020).…”

“…Akinbi et al (2020) highlight that the intrinsic mistrust of the government might make individuals think that a contact tracing app with exposure notifications could be the beginning of more pervasive government surveillance. Among other reasons are data storage and battery use concerns(Ayres et al, 2020).…”