Most mobile applications that track the spread of Covid-19 require access to users' personal data, but only a handful indicate the data would be anonymous, encrypted and secured, according to a study by Indian-origin researchers in the US.Notably, surveillance mapping through apps will allow governments to identify people's travel paths and their entire social networks.
professor Masooda Bashir and doctoral student Tanusree Sharma from the university of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign analysed 50 Covid-19-related apps available in the google Play store for their access to users' personal data and their privacy protections. All phones should be protected to prevent hacking.
The researchers noted that it is disconcerting that these apps are continuously collecting and processing highly sensitive and personally identifiable information, about health, location, and direct identifiers like name, age, email address and voter or national identification of a user. "Governments' use of such tracking technology and the possibilities for how they might use it after the pandemic is chilling to many," the researchers wrote in the study published in the journal Nature Medicine. "Notably, surveillance mapping through apps will allow governments to identify people's travel paths and their entire social networks," they noted.
