Data privacy during pandemics: a systematic literature review of COVID-19 smartphone applications

Abstract

Background: On January 8, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially announced a new virus in Wuhan, China. The first novel coronavirus(COVID-19) case was discovered on December 1, 2019, implying that the disease wasspreading quietly and quickly in the community before reaching the rest of theworld. To deal with the virus’ wide spread, countries have deployed contact tracingmobile applications to control viral transmission. Such applications collect users’information and inform them if they were in contact with an individual diagnosedwith COVID-19. However, these applications might have affected human rights bybreaching users’ privacy.Methodology: This systematic literature review followed a comprehensivemethodology to highlight current research discussing such privacy issues. First, itused a search strategy to obtain 808 relevant papers published in 2020 from wellestablisheddigital libraries. Second, inclusion/exclusion criteria and the snowballingtechnique were applied to produce more comprehensive results. Finally, by theapplication of a quality assessment procedure, 40 studies were chosen.Results: This review highlights privacy issues, discusses centralized and decentralizedmodels and the different technologies affecting users’ privacy, and identifies solutionsto improve data privacy from three perspectives: public, law, and healthconsiderations.Conclusions: Governments need to address the privacy issues related to contacttracing apps. This can be done through enforcing special policies to guarantee usersprivacy. Additionally, it is important to be transparent and let users know what datais being collected and how it is being used