scholarly journals Evaluating the trade-off between privacy, public health safety, and digital security in a pandemic

Data & Policy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Titi Akinsanmi ◽  
Aishat Salami
Keyword(s):  
Health Sector ◽  
Personal Health Information ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Privacy Rights ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Accountability Measures ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
User Data ◽  
And Control

Abstract COVID-19 has impacted all aspects of everyday normalcy globally. During the height of the pandemic, people shared their (PI) with one goal—to protect themselves from contracting an “unknown and rapidly mutating” virus. The technologies (from applications based on mobile devices to online platforms) collect (with or without informed consent) large amounts of PI including location, travel, and personal health information. These were deployed to monitor, track, and control the spread of the virus. However, many of these measures encouraged the trade-off on privacy for safety. In this paper, we reexamine the nature of privacy through the lens of safety focused on the health sector, digital security, and what constitutes an infraction or otherwise of the privacy rights of individuals in a pandemic as experienced in the past 18 months. This paper makes a case for maintaining a balance between the benefit, which the contact tracing apps offer in the containment of COVID-19 with the need to ensure end-user privacy and data security. Specifically, it strengthens the case for designing with transparency and accountability measures and safeguards in place as critical to protecting the privacy and digital security of users—in the use, collection, and retention of user data. We recommend oversight measures to ensure compliance with the principles of lawful processing, knowing that these, among others, would ensure the integration of privacy by design principles even in unforeseen crises like an ongoing pandemic; entrench public trust and acceptance, and protect the digital security of people.

Tracing or Tracking? A Preliminary Analysis of COVID-19 Outbreak Tracker Apps on Android and User Privacy (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Akinbi ◽  
Ehizojie Ojie
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
User Participation ◽  
Memory Storage ◽  
Phone Call ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Privacy Rights ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
Android Apps ◽  
User Data

BACKGROUND Technology using digital contact tracing apps has the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks by recording proximity events between individuals and alerting people who have been exposed. However, there are concerns about the abuse of user privacy rights as such apps can be repurposed to collect private user data by service providers and governments who like to gather their citizens’ private data. OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to conduct a preliminary analysis of 34 COVID-19 trackers Android apps used in 29 individual countries to track COVID-19 symptoms, cases, and provide public health information. METHODS We identified each app’s AndroidManifest.xml resource file and examined the dangerous permissions requested by each app. RESULTS The results in this study show 70.5% of the apps request access to user location data, 47% request access to phone activities including the phone number, cellular network information, and the status of any ongoing calls. 44% of the apps request access to read from external memory storage and 2.9% request permission to download files without notification. 17.6% of the apps initiate a phone call without giving the user option to confirm the call. CONCLUSIONS The contributions of this study include a description of these dangerous permissions requested by each app and its effects on user privacy. We discuss principles that must be adopted in the development of future tracking and contact tracing apps to preserve the privacy of users and show transparency which in turn will encourage user participation.

scholarly journals Contact tracing apps for COVID-19 pandemic: Challenges and potential

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Akinbi ◽  
Mark Forshaw ◽  
Victoria Blinkhorn
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Privacy Rights ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Liberal Societies ◽  
Public Health Authorities ◽  
User Data

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread with increased fatalities around the world and has become an international public health crisis. Public health authorities in many countries have introduced contact tracing apps to track and trace infected persons as part of measures to contain the spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, there are major concerns about its efficacy and privacy with affects mass acceptance amongst a population. This review encompasses the current challenges facing this technology in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in neo-liberal societies. We explore and discuss the plausibility for abuse of user privacy rights as such apps collect private user data and can be repurposed by governments for surveillance on their citizens. Other challenges identified and discussed include ethical issues, security vulnerabilities, user behavior and participation, and technical constraints. Finally, in the analysis of this review, recommendations to address these challenges and considerations in the use of less invasive digital contact tracing technologies for future pandemics are presented. For policy makers in neo-liberal societies, this study provides an in-depth review of issues that must be addressed, highlights recommendations to improve the efficacy of such apps, and could facilitate mass acceptance amongst users.

scholarly journals Analisis privasi data pengguna contact tracing application pengendalian COVID-19 di Indonesia berdasarkan PERPRES RI No. 95 tahun 2018 tentang sistem pemerintahan berbasis elektronik

Teknologi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-58
Author(s):  
Syifa Ilma Nabila Suwandi ◽  
◽  
Xavier Wahyuadi Seloatmodjo ◽  
Alexandra Situmorang ◽  
Nur Aini Rakhmawati ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Privacy ◽  
Continuous System ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Privacy Policy ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Three Samples ◽  
User Data ◽  
The Republic

The presence of user contact applications in the community as a means of preventing and overcoming the spread of COVID-19 can pose another risk to the potential dangers of protecting data privacy from contact tracing. This research examines more deeply related to user privacy policies through 3 (three) samples of android-based user contact applications that are used as a means of preventing, overcoming and controlling the spread of the COVID-19 virus in today's society and by reviewing the rules contained in the Presidential Regulation of the Republic. Indonesian No. 95 of 2018 concerning Electronic-Based Government Systems (SPBE). The study in this study was prepared using the method of literature study, observation and qualitative analysis. A comparison was made regarding the data privacy of the three samples, which was then evaluated and matched with the form of the privacy policy according to Presidential Regulation No. 95 of 2018 concerning Electronic-Based Government Systems (SPBE) and according to the ideal form of data privacy policy based on several experts. Comparative data is obtained through related applications and other electronic media which are then discussed together to conclude and evaluate the data privacy policies of the three sample applications. Based on this research, it can be concluded that privacy intervention to deal with damage and save lives is legal as long as its use is in accordance with regulations in the health, disaster, telecommunications, informatics and other related fields; in this case listed in the Presidential Decree No. 95 of 2018 concerning Electronic-Based Government Systems (SPBE) and there needs to be an increase in efforts to maintain the security and confidentiality of user data privacy through continuous system and data maintenance, encryption of data privacy storage in the manager's data warehouse and added with other data privacy policies can guarantee the security and confidentiality of the privacy of user data.

scholarly journals PRIVACY IN ADVANCED CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS: PROTOTYPICAL EXAMPLES

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-451
Author(s):  
Phan Duong Hieu ◽  
Moti Yung
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Privacy Protection ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Cryptographic Protocols ◽  
Cloud Services ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Learning Tools ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
User Data ◽  
The Right

Cryptography is the fundamental cornerstone of cybersecurity employed for achieving data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. However, when cryptographic protocols are deployed for emerging applications such as cloud services or big data, the demand for security grows beyond these basic requirements. Data nowadays are being extensively stored in the cloud, users also need to trust the cloud servers/authorities that run powerful applications. Collecting user data, combined with powerful machine learning tools, can come with a huge risk of mass surveillance or undesirable data-driven strategies for making profits rather than for serving the user. Privacy, therefore, becomes more and more important, and new techniques should be developed to protect personal information and to reduce trust requirements on the authorities or the Big Tech providers. In a general sense, privacy is ``the right to be left alone'' and privacy protection allows individuals to have control over how their personal information is collected and used. In this survey, we discuss the privacy protection methods of various cryptographic protocols, in particular we review: - Privacy in electronic voting systems. This may be, perhaps, the most important real-world application where privacy plays a fundamental role. %classical authentication with group, ring signatures, anonymous credentials. - Private computation. This may be the widest domain in the new era of modern technologies with cloud computing and big data, where users delegate the storage of their data and the computation to the cloud. In such a situation, ``how can we preserve privacy?'' is one of the most important questions in cryptography nowadays. - Privacy in contact tracing. This is a typical example of a concrete study on a contemporary scenario where one should deal with the unexpected social problem but needs not pay the cost of weakening the privacy of users. Finally, we will discuss some notions which aim at reinforcing privacy by masking the type of protocol that we execute, we call it the covert cryptographic primitives and protocols.

Trade-off Between Time Delays and Control Effort

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (31) ◽  
pp. 287-291
Author(s):  
Pedro Albertos ◽  
Manuel Olivares ◽  
Mario E. Salgado
Keyword(s):  
Time Delays ◽  
Control Effort ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
And Control

scholarly journals Device-Based Security to Improve User Privacy in the Internet of Things †

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 2664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Belem Pacheco ◽  
Eduardo Pelinson Alchieri ◽  
Priscila Mendez Barreto
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Internet Of Things ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Data Access ◽  
Cloud Services ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
User Privacy ◽  
Privacy And Security ◽  
Iot Devices ◽  
And Control

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing and a huge amount of data is being generated by IoT devices. Cloud computing is a natural candidate to handle this data since it has enough power and capacity to process, store and control data access. Moreover, this approach brings several benefits to the IoT, such as the aggregation of all IoT data in a common place and the use of cloud services to consume this data and provide useful applications. However, enforcing user privacy when sending sensitive information to the cloud is a challenge. This work presents and evaluates an architecture to provide privacy in the integration of IoT and cloud computing. The proposed architecture, called PROTeCt—Privacy aRquitecture for integratiOn of internet of Things and Cloud computing, improves user privacy by implementing privacy enforcement at the IoT devices instead of at the gateway, as is usually done. Consequently, the proposed approach improves both system security and fault tolerance, since it removes the single point of failure (gateway). The proposed architecture is evaluated through an analytical analysis and simulations with severely constrained devices, where delay and energy consumption are evaluated and compared to other architectures. The obtained results show the practical feasibility of the proposed solutions and demonstrate that the overheads introduced in the IoT devices are worthwhile considering the increased level of privacy and security.

scholarly journals TraceTogether: Pandemic Response, Democracy, and Technology

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hallam Stevens ◽  
Monamie Bhadra Haines
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Science ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Government Power ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Pandemic Response ◽  
And Control

Abstract On 20 March 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Singapore government released a new app called TraceTogether. Developed by the Ministry of Health, SG United, and GovTech Singapore, the app uses the Bluetooth capability of smartphones to store information about other smartphones that have come into close proximity with your own. These data facilitate the government’s process of “contact tracing” through which they track those who have potentially come into contact with the virus and place them in quarantine. This essay attempts to understand what kinds of citizens and civic behavior might be brought into being by this technology. By examining the workings and affordances of the TraceTogether app in detail, the authors argue that its peer-to-peer and open-source technology features mobilize the rhetorics and ideals of citizens science and democratic participation. However, by deploying these within a context that centralizes data, the app turns ideals born of dissent and protest on their head, using them to build trust not within a community but rather in government power and control. Rather than building social trust, TraceTogether becomes a technological substitute for it. The significant public support for TraceTogether shows both the possibilities and limitations of citizen science in less liberal political contexts and circumstances.

scholarly journals Reading input flooding versus listening input flooding: Can they boost speaking skill?

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Mojgan Rashtchi ◽  
Leila Mohammad Yousefi
Keyword(s):  
Control Group ◽  
Coding System ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Speaking Skill ◽  
Listening Group ◽  
And Control

Abstract The present study compared the effects of reading input flooding and listening input flooding techniques on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian EFL learners’ speaking skill. Participants were 66 homogeneous intermediate EFL learners who were randomly divided into three groups of 22: Reading input flooding group, listening input flooding group, and control group. The reading flooded input group was exposed to the numerous examples of the target structures through reading. In the same phase, the listening group was given relatively the same task, through listening. The participants’ monologues in the posttest were separately recorded, and later transcribed and coded in terms of accuracy and complexity through Bygate’s (2001) standard coding system. The results of ANCOVA indicated the outperformance of reading input flooding group. The study also supported the trade-off effects (Skehan, 1998, 2009) between accuracy and complexity.

The Indonesia-Australia Cooperation In Responding To The Covid-19 Pandemic (2020)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 851-861
Author(s):  
Mentari Mentari
Keyword(s):  
Health Sector ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Library Research ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Data Collection Technique ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Descriptive Method

The COVID-19 pandemic began in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and rapidly spread to all over the world. The COVID-19 caused by SARS-Cov-2 and more than one million people have been affected worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic not only impacts the health sector, but the pandemic triggered to the economic crisis with expansive social effects. Due to the impact of COVID-19, the international cooperation needs to be taken to responding and control the pandemic. Indonesia and Australia as a close neighbour, have worked closely in disaster risk management and currently cooperate to response the COVID-19. This study aims to describe the cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in responding the impacts of COVID-19. This study uses a qualitative approach with descriptive method. The data collection technique used based on secondary data in the form of literature review (library research) including books, journals, reports, organization’s websites, online articles, and scientific papers that are related to the study. The author uses the concept of cooperation to support the idea of cooperation between Indonesia and Australia to responding the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides that the cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in responding the impacts of COVID-19 are divided into three sectors, namely health security, stability, and economic recovery.

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