Callie Monroe, Faiza Tazi, Sanchari Das (university of Denver)

Governments, Healthcare, and Private Organizations in the global scale have been using digital tracking to keep COVID-19 outbreaks under control. Although this method could limit pandemic contagion, it raises significant concerns about user privacy. Known as “Contact Tracing Apps” , these mobile applications are facilitated by Cellphone Service Providers (CSPs), who enable the spatial and temporal realtime user tracking. Accordingly, it might be speculated that CSPs collect information violating the privacy policies such as GDPR, CCPA, and others. To further clarify, we conducted an in-depth analysis comparing privacy legislations with the real world practices adapted by CSPs. We found that three of the regulations (GDPR, COPPA, and CCPA) analyzed defined mobile location data as private information, and two (T-Mobile US, Boost Mobile) of the five CSPs that were analyzed did not comply with the COPPA regulation. Our results are crucial in view of the threat these violations represent, especially when it comes to children’s data. As such proper security and privacy auditing is necessary to curtail such violations. We conclude by providing actionable recommendations to address concerns and provide privacy-preserving monitoring of the COVID-19 spread through the contact tracing applications.

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Mitziu Echeverria (The University of Iowa), Zeeshan Ahmed (The University of Iowa), Bincheng Wang (The University of Iowa), M. Fareed Arif (The University of Iowa), Syed Rafiul Hussain (Pennsylvania State University), Omar Chowdhury (The University of Iowa)

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Adryana Hutchinson (The George Washington University), Jinwei Tang (Clark University), Adam Aviv (The George Washington University), Peter Story (Clark University)

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Laura Matzen, Michelle A Leger, Geoffrey Reedy (Sandia National Laboratories)

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Mohd Sabra (University of Texas at San Antonio), Anindya Maiti (University of Oklahoma), Murtuza Jadliwala (University of Texas at San Antonio)

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