Discussing Privacy and Surveillance on Twitter: A Case Study of COVID-19 (original) (raw)
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COVID-19, Digital Privacy, and the Social Limits on Data-Focused Public Health Responses
International Journal of Information Management, 2020
The implementation of digital contact tracing applications around the world to help reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the most ambitious uses of massive-scale citizen data ever attempted. There is major divergence among nations, however, between a “privacy-first” approach which protects citizens’ data at the cost of extremely limited access for public health authorities and researchers, and a “data-first” approach which stores large amounts of data which, while of immeasurable value to epidemiologists and other researchers, may significantly intrude upon citizens’ privacy. The lack of a consensus on privacy protection in the contact tracing process creates risks of non-compliance or deliberate obfuscation from citizens who fear revealing private aspects of their lives – a factor greatly exacerbated by recent major scandals over online privacy and the illicit use of citizens’ digital information, which have heightened public consciousness of these issues and created significant new challenges for any collection of large-scale public data. While digital contact tracing for COVID-19 remains in its infancy, the lack of consensus around best practices for its implementation and for reassuring citizens of the protection of their privacy may already have impeded its capacity to contribute to the pandemic response.
What is Known from a Network?: Digital Contact Tracing, Privacy, and Pandemics in the Digital Age
Social Science Research Network, 2020
COVID-19 is an unprecedented crisis that has sparked unprecedented responses from governments around the world. These responses pose a threat to democratic stability and civil liberties. Digital contact tracing is just one example of a technology-based crisis response measure that has been rapidly deployed but could have far-reaching negative consequences for society. This paper explores the risks and consequences of collecting, collating, and storing digital data on people's networks of contacts as a crisis response measure. We aim to inform a discussion on the tradeoffs between the value of creating the data for public health outcomes and the risks to public trust in government and democratic stability. We ask, "What are the privacy risks of digital contact tracing, and what consequences does this have for national security and democratic stability?" We analyze the considerations that governments are taking in designing and deploying digital responses to the crisis in the case of digital contact tracing, and we explore what information can be derived from the data on populations and how this information could be misused in ways that harm democratic principles. We argue that government collection of digital contact tracing data poses a serious threat to civil liberties owing to the potential for the data to become a geopolitical target for hacking and interference in democratic stability through information warfare. We then propose a number of technical considerations and policy settings that are transparent, temporary, and proportionate to limit data vulnerabilities and provide a framework to better safeguard civil liberties and democracy in the digital age.
Computers in Human Behavior, 2023
During COVID-19, digital contact tracing has been adopted as an efficient anti-pandemic measure worldwide, evoking global privacy concerns. Based on a survey of six jurisdictions with 5312 representative samples from Asian and Western societies in June 2021, this study investigates factors shaping an individual's willingness to disclose privacy to curb the pandemic. We propose a three-dimensional framework to analyze how individuals understand privacy in decision-making: privacy as a utilitarian tool, privacy as a value-driven right, and privacy as a contextualized strategy. The findings first suggest a strong utilitarian mindset: the perceived benefit of using contact tracing apps to curb the pandemic enhanced individuals' willingness to render their privacy, and the perceived risk of leakage of personal data weakened such willingness. Such patterns were consistent across societies. Second, the data reveal a positive association between collectivism and intention of privacy disclosure but find no significant moderation effects between the cultural and utilitarian concerns. In addition, the study finds that the perceived threat of the pandemic enhances people's willingness to disclose privacy on the one hand and suppresses the impacts of the utilitarian calculus and value-oriented privacy perception, suggesting crisis psychology on privacy concerns. Our study offers a nuanced understanding of privacy during the crisis and invites further discussion on adopting information communication technology for governance in the post-COVID world.
COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Privacy: A Longitudinal Study of Public Opinion
Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 2021
There is growing use of technology-enabled contact tracing, the process of identifying potentially infected COVID-19 patients by notifying all recent contacts of an infected person. Governments, technology companies, and research groups alike have been working towards releasing smartphone apps, using IoT devices, and distributing wearable technology to automatically track “close contacts” and identify prior contacts in the event an individual tests positive. However, there has been significant public discussion about the tensions between effective technology-based contact tracing and the privacy of individuals. To inform this discussion, we present the results of seven months of online surveys focused on contact tracing and privacy, each with 100 participants. Our first surveys were on April 1 and 3, 2020, before the first peak of the virus in the US, and we continued to conduct the surveys weekly for 10 weeks (through June), and then fortnightly through November, adding topical que...
IEEE Access
There has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing attackers to victimise social media users with a range of threats. This paper performs a large-scale study to investigate the impact of a pandemic and the lockdown periods on the security and privacy of social media users. We analyse 10.6 Million COVID-related tweets from 533 days of data crawling and investigate users' security and privacy behaviour in three different periods (i.e., before, during, and after the lockdown). Our study shows that users unintentionally share more personal identifiable information when writing about the pandemic situation (e.g., sharing nearby coronavirus testing locations) in their tweets. The privacy risk reaches 100% if a user posts three or more sensitive tweets about the pandemic. We investigate the number of suspicious domains shared on social media during different phases of the pandemic. Our analysis reveals an increase in the number of suspicious domains during the lockdown compared to other lockdown phases. We observe that IT, Search Engines, and Businesses are the top three categories that contain suspicious domains. Our analysis reveals that adversaries' strategies to instigate malicious activities change with the country's pandemic situation. INDEX TERMS Social media security and privacy, web security and privacy, privacy risk quantification, sentiment analysis, hashtag analysis, COVID-19, Twitter data.
Cornell University - arXiv, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic era will be remembered as a uniquely disruptive period that altered the lives of billions of citizens globally, resulting in new-normal for the way people live and work. With the coronavirus pandemic, businesses, governments, and educational institutes adapted to the "work or study from home" operating model that has not only transformed our online lives but has also exponentially increased the use of cyberspace. Concurrently, there has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter during the COVID-19 lockdown periods. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing attackers to victimise users of social media platforms in times of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The threats range from running phishing campaigns and malicious domains to extracting private information about victims for malicious purposes. To this end, it is vital to analyse the impact of drastic transformations that were taken during lockdown periods on the security and privacy of users. This research paper performs a large-scale study to investigate the impact of lockdown periods during COVID-19 pandemic on the security and privacy of social media users. We analyse 10.6 Million COVID-related tweets from 533 days of data crawling and investigate users' security and privacy behaviour in three different periods (i.e., before, during, and after lockdown). Our study shows that users unintentionally share more personal identifiable information when writing about the pandemic situation (e.g., sharing building name, nearby coronavirus testing location) in their tweets. The privacy risk reaches to 100% if a user posts three or more sensitive tweets about the pandemic. We investigate the number of suspicious domains shared in social media during different phases of the pandemic. Our analysis reveals an increase in the number of suspicious domains during the lockdown compared to other lockdown phases. We observe that IT, Search Engines, and Businesses are the top three categories that contain suspicious domains. Our analysis reveals that adversaries' strategies to instigate malicious activities change with the country's pandemic situation.
Balancing privacy at the time of pandemic: global observation
International Journal of Public Health Science (IJPHS)
The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 has initiated the development of mobile applications aiming at helping public health authorities to slow down viral diffusion. The proliferation of these applications engenders challenges to forge a balance between ‘public health utility’ and ‘personal privacy’. This paper scrutinizes various applications that collect personal data according to their functions and data protection compliance. These applications are mostly of three broader categories- contact tracing, self-assessment, and quarantine enforcement. We conduct systematic categorization based on five parameters-type of owner or provider, host platform, functionalities, the existence of privacy policy, and state of the source code. A total of 122 apps encompassing 83 countries were assessed during a research period of 20 days (June 1 to 20, 2020). Findings suggest that although the majority of the applications publish a privacy policy, many applications do not give information in detail, makin...
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2021
Controlling the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a cross-border strategy by which national governments attempt to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. A response based on sharing facts about millions of private movements and a call to study information behavior during the global health crisis has been advised worldwide. The present study aims to identify the technologies to control the COVID-19 and future pandemics with massive data collection from users' mobile devices. This research undertakes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the studies about the currently available methods, strategies, and actions to collect and analyze data from users' mobile devices. In a total of 76 relevant studies, 13 technologies that are classified based on the following aspect of data and data management have been identified: (1) security; (2) destruction; (3) voluntary access; (4) time span; and (5) storage. In addition, in order to understand how these technologies can affect user privacy, 25 data points that these technologies could have access to if installed through mobile applications have been detected. The paper concludes with a discussion of important theoretical and practical implications of preserving user privacy and curbing COVID-19 infections in the global public health emergency situation.