COVID-19 vs Social Media Apps: Does Privacy Really Matter?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01779v1
• Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 02:08:34 GMT
• Title: COVID-19 vs Social Media Apps: Does Privacy Really Matter?
• Authors: Omar Haggag, Sherif Haggag, John Grundy, Mohamed Abdelrazek
• Abstract summary: Many people around the world are worried about using or even downloading COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps. Social Media & Productivity apps actually have substantially higher privacy and ethical issues compared with the majority of COVID-19 apps. Most of the COVID-19 apps are less accessible and stable compared to most Social Media apps.
• Score: 6.411678616211634
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Many people around the world are worried about using or even downloading COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps. The main reported concerns are centered around privacy and ethical issues. At the same time, people are voluntarily using Social Media apps at a significantly higher rate during the pandemic without similar privacy concerns compared with COVID-19 apps. To better understand these seemingly anomalous behaviours, we analysed the privacy policies, terms & conditions and data use agreements of the most commonly used COVID-19, Social Media & Productivity apps. We also developed a tool to extract and analyse nearly 2 million user reviews for these apps. Our results show that Social Media & Productivity apps actually have substantially higher privacy and ethical issues compared with the majority of COVID-19 apps. Surprisingly, lots of people indicated in their user reviews that they feel more secure as their privacy are better handled in COVID-19 apps than in Social Media apps. On the other hand, most of the COVID-19 apps are less accessible and stable compared to most Social Media apps, which negatively impacted their store ratings and led users to uninstall COVID-19 apps more frequently. Our findings suggest that in order to effectively fight this pandemic, health officials and technologists will need to better raise awareness among people about COVID-19 app behaviour and trustworthiness. This will allow people to better understand COVID-19 apps and encourage them to download and use these apps. Moreover, COVID-19 apps need many accessibility enhancements to allow a wider range of users from different societies and cultures to access to these apps.

Related papers

• A Large-Scale Empirical Study of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Mobile App Reviews [2.2957483176038584]
  We collected reviews of 35 COVID-19 contact tracing apps developed by 34 countries across the globe. We group the app reviews into the following geographical regions: Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, and Australasia. While privacy could be a concern with such apps, we only find privacy-related topics in Australasia, North America, and Middle East. Users frequently complained about the lack of features, user interface and the negative impact of such apps on their mobile batteries.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-28T09:31:36Z)
• "COVID-19 was a FIFA conspiracy #curropt": An Investigation into the Viral Spread of COVID-19 Misinformation [60.268682953952506]
  We estimate the extent to which misinformation has influenced the course of the COVID-19 pandemic using natural language processing models. We provide a strategy to combat social media posts that are likely to cause widespread harm.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-12T19:41:01Z)
• Analysis of Longitudinal Changes in Privacy Behavior of Android Applications [79.71330613821037]
  In this paper, we examine the trends in how Android apps have changed over time with respect to privacy. We examine the adoption of HTTPS, whether apps scan the device for other installed apps, the use of permissions for privacy-sensitive data, and the use of unique identifiers. We find that privacy-related behavior has improved with time as apps continue to receive updates, and that the third-party libraries used by apps are responsible for more issues with privacy.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-12-28T16:21:31Z)
• Public Perception of the German COVID-19 Contact-Tracing App Corona-Warn-App [0.16332728502735247]
  In Germany, the related app is called Corona-Warn-App, and by end of 2020, it had 22.8 million downloads. Contact tracing is a promising approach for containing the spread of the novel coronavirus. Based on app reviews and tweets, we are analyzing the public perception of Corona-Warn-App.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-21T14:17:38Z)
• What Makes People Install a COVID-19 Contact-Tracing App? Understanding the Influence of App Design and Individual Difference on Contact-Tracing App Adoption Intention [15.031178068213508]
  Smartphone-based contact-tracing apps are a promising solution to help scale up the conventional contact-tracing process. We present a national-scale survey experiment in the U.S. to investigate the effects of app design choices and individual differences on COVID-19 contact-tracing app adoption intentions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-22T23:46:47Z)
• Market-level Analysis of Government-backed COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps [7.222710562941077]
  Government and public health authorities have launched a number of contact-tracing apps to help curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. We perform the first market-level analysis of contact tracing apps.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-20T08:43:03Z)
• Understanding the Hoarding Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic using Large Scale Social Media Data [77.34726150561087]
  We analyze the hoarding and anti-hoarding patterns of over 42,000 unique Twitter users in the United States from March 1 to April 30, 2020. We find the percentage of females in both hoarding and anti-hoarding groups is higher than that of the general Twitter user population. The LIWC anxiety mean for the hoarding-related tweets is significantly higher than the baseline Twitter anxiety mean.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-15T16:02:25Z)
• Emerging App Issue Identification via Online Joint Sentiment-Topic Tracing [66.57888248681303]
  We propose a novel emerging issue detection approach named MERIT. Based on the AOBST model, we infer the topics negatively reflected in user reviews for one app version. Experiments on popular apps from Google Play and Apple's App Store demonstrate the effectiveness of MERIT.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-08-23T06:34:05Z)
• How good is good enough for COVID19 apps? The influence of benefits, accuracy, and privacy on willingness to adopt [24.202334512830255]
  A growing number of contact tracing apps are being developed to complement manual contact tracing. We evaluate the effect of both accuracy and privacy concerns on reported willingness to install COVID19 contact tracing apps.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-09T01:53:52Z)
• Privacy-Aware Recommender Systems Challenge on Twitter's Home Timeline [47.434392695347924]
  RecSys 2020 Challenge organized by ACM RecSys in partnership with Twitter using this dataset. This paper touches on the key challenges faced by researchers and professionals striving to predict user engagements.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-28T23:54:33Z)
• The Ivory Tower Lost: How College Students Respond Differently than the General Public to the COVID-19 Pandemic [66.80677233314002]
  Pandemic of the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented governments with ultimate challenges. In the United States, the country with the highest confirmed COVID-19 infection cases, a nationwide social distancing protocol has been implemented by the President. This paper aims to discover the social implications of this unprecedented disruption in our interactive society by mining people's opinions on social media.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-21T13:02:38Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.