When the notion of enlisting smartphones to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic first surfaced last spring, it sparked a months-long debate: Should apps collect location data, which could help with contact-tracing but potentially reveal sensitive information? Or should they take a more limited approach, only measuring Bluetooth-based proximity to other phones? Now, a broad survey of hundreds of Covid-related apps reveals that the answer is all of the above. And that's made the Covid app ecosystem a kind of wild, sprawling landscape, full of potential privacy pitfalls.
Late last month Jonathan Albright, the director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, released the results of his analysis of 493 Covid-related iOS apps across dozens of countries. His study of those apps, which tackle everything from symptom-tracking to telehealth consultations to contact tracing, catalogues the data permissions each one requests. At WIRED's request, Albright then broke down the data set further to focus specifically on the 359 apps that handle contact tracing, exposure notification, screening, reporting, workplace monitoring, and Covid information from public health authorities around the globe.
The results show that only 47 of that subset of 359 apps use Google and Apple's more privacy-friendly exposure notification system, which restricts apps to only Bluetooth data collection. More than six out of seven Covid-focused iOS apps worldwide are free to request whatever privacy permissions they want, with 59 percent asking for a user's location when in use, and 43 percent tracking location at all times. Albright found that 44 percent of Covid apps on iOS asked for access to ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
