The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

10-2021

Culminating Project Type

Starred Paper

Degree Name

Information Assurance: M.S. - 5 year track for SCSU Undergraduates

Department

Information Assurance and Information Systems

College

Herberger School of Business

First Advisor

Abu Hussein

Second Advisor

Jim Chen

Third Advisor

Lynn Collen

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

The problem addressed by this research paper is the lack of data security and privacy in COVID-19 tracking and tracing mobile applications. There have been reports of countless COVID-19 tracking and tracing apps leaking data and making use of geo location, which has left users fearful of their data being misused. This research intends to examine and investigate those mobile applications, their features, and their working mechanisms to disclose potential threats to user data. In case the personal user data gets in the hands of people with ill intentions, the data can be misused to commit illegal activities, putting the lives and legal records of users directly in harm. Hence, this is a crucial topic to be studied and solved in the current times. This research paper will firstly be explaining terms like tracking and tracing in order to make the concept of these mobile applications clearer to the readers. Additionally, this research paper will be presenting a list of all the COVID-19 tracking and tracing that have been available and are active around the world, including the USA. Furthermore, this research paper will be presenting cases of COVID-19 tracking and tracing apps that have been found to have violated user privacy and data security. Then, this research paper will be investigating the features of these faulty covid-19 tracking and tracing applications for flaws that result in unauthorized data sharing. After that, this research paper will be making educating recommendations and suggestions to users to prevent unauthorized data sharing and disruption of their data privacy. Lastly, this research paper will be studying multiple researches done on the same topic previously by researchers around the world and will be providing critical review on those research papers published before this one. By performing research on all the previously mentioned topics, this research paper intends to contribute to the process of solving user privacy and data security issues in COVID-19 tracking and tracing applications.

Download

Share

COinS