Trust Concerns in Health Apps collecting Personally Identifiable Information during COVID-19-like Zoonosis

TL;DR

This paper examines trust issues in health apps collecting PII during COVID-19, analyzing their design, limitations, and user trust concerns to improve privacy and security in future health crises.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of health app trust issues during COVID-19 and offers recommendations to enhance user trust and privacy protection.

Findings

Identifies trust defiance in health apps due to privacy concerns

Analyzes limitations of current health applications during COVID-19

Suggests strategies to improve user trust and app security

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19 in short, is a zoonosis, i.e., a disease that spreads from animals to humans. Due to its highly epizootic nature, it has compelled the public health experts to deploy smartphone applications to trace its rapid transmission pattern along with the infected persons as well by utilizing the persons' personally identifiable information. However, these information may summon several undesirable provocations towards the technical experts in terms of privacy and cyber security, particularly the trust concerns. If not resolved by now, the circumstances will affect the mass level population through inadequate usage of the health applications in the smartphones and thus liberate the forgery of a catastrophe for another COVID-19-like zoonosis to come. Therefore, an extensive study was required to address this severe issue. This paper has fulfilled the study mentioned above needed by not only discussing the recently designed and developed health applications all over the regions around the world but also investigating their usefulness and limitations. The trust defiance is identified as well as scrutinized from the viewpoint of an end-user. Several recommendations are suggested in the later part of this paper to leverage awareness among the ordinary individuals.