Apple and Google are developing a unified contact tracing app for coronavirus, however much work is needed from the two tech giants to address consumer privacy and coverage concerns.
COVID-19 contact tracing apps are possible cyber threats to national security as they can be used to steal patient data and spread destructive malware in healthcare systems.
While many privacy concerns remain unaddressed for contact tracing apps, experts are now questioning the technical and logistics issues to justify their existence.
While contact tracing apps in different countries are under various stages of deployment, there is an ongoing debate over the use of centralized vs. decentralized tracking in the app.
Countries are working on contact tracing apps that have data safeguards built in to address privacy concerns while fighting against COVID-19. Can these apps really preserve privacy?
Norway suspended the operation of its contact tracing app "Smittestopp" after being ranked among the world’s most privacy-invasive apps, next to Bahrain and Qatar.
Google and Apple’s contact tracing app was supposed to put user privacy first. Each of the tech giants has blocked the most recent update from the NHS, citing privacy violations.
Australia's OAIC has called for law enforcement to be blocked from accessing Covid contact tracing data to track suspects via their check-in histories, saying that it threatens to undermine public participation in the program.
MIT researchers in collaboration with CMU, Brown and Boston University has developed a privacy preserving COVID-19 contact tracing app that uses Bluetooth to broadcast chiprs of random IDs to other devices.
The lack of compatibility between the first contact tracing apps from France and Italy highlights a fragmented EU landscape that has yet to have an answer for cross-border movement issues.
