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.

View More Papers

Data Poisoning Attacks to Deep Learning Based Recommender Systems

Hai Huang (Tsinghua University), Jiaming Mu (Tsinghua University), Neil Zhenqiang Gong (Duke University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Bin Liu (West Virginia University), Mingwei Xu (Tsinghua University)

Read More

icLibFuzzer: Isolated-context libFuzzer for Improving Fuzzer Comparability

Yu-Chuan Liang, Hsu-Chun Hsiao (National Taiwan University)

Read More

SODA: A Generic Online Detection Framework for Smart Contracts

Ting Chen (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Rong Cao (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Ting Li (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Xiapu Luo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Guofei Gu (Texas A&M University), Yufei Zhang (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Zhou Liao (University…

Read More

Vision: An Exploration of Online Toxic Content Against Refugees

Arjun Arunasalam (Purdue University), Habiba Farrukh (University of California, Irvine), Eliz Tekcan (Purdue University), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University)

Read More