# A Multidimensional Analysis of Released COVID-19 Location-Based Mobile Applications
## 4 The Framework of Mapping and Evaluating COVID-19 LBMAs
### Legal Aspects of COVID-19 LBMAs: Privacy Concerns and Human Rights  
Contact detection is a vital tool in the fight against COVID-19 that serves a short-term good for public safety, but it could be a long-term threat to the protection of our privacy. Smartphones can be used as a tool to identify an infected individual's contacts during an epidemic quickly. Nevertheless, it also raises serious privacy questions regarding the long-term disadvantages of increased surveillance activities, the custodian of the data, how it might be utilized, and how it should be governed. Thus, on 20 March 2020, the Singapore Ministry of Health released the \"TraceTogether\" (app no 123) for Android and iOS, which is designed to assist health officials in tracking down exposures after an infected individual is identified. The Trace Together app tracks via Bluetooth when two app users have been in close proximity. In Taiwan, authorities track phone location data for anyone under quarantine. \"The goal is to stop people from running around and spreading the infection\", said [PERSON], head of Taiwan's Department of Cyber Security, who leads efforts to work with telecom carriers to combat the virus [33]. However, important privacy implications arise from the existence of such tracking apps, which have been used to expand mass surveillance, restrict individual freedoms,and expose the most private details about individuals [19]. Privacy is a central feature of conversations related to mobile contact tracing apps, encouraging efforts to develop effective alternative solutions with more robust privacy protection for the users, while still achieving the public health goal of informing people of potential exposures to help slow the spread of the disease. A discussion regarding the implementation of app-based contact tracing to control the COVID-19 pandemic focuses on data protection and user acceptability aspects suggest the appropriate technology adoption. Such solutions will often increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the respective data-processing system. Only if people trust a system--because it does not spy on them--will the system find broad support in the population. Therefore, according to new technologies, quick and efficient contact detection is possible without extensive collection of amounts of data in a central database. Alternatives to the non-usage of location tracking and proximity tracing technologies have been implemented in Singapore which includes Bluetooth tokens that provide users with anonymity which might be an issue for many users [34]. Thus, with sufficient computational resources and the use of cryptographic protocols, app-based contact tracing can be accomplished without completely sacrificing privacy. We believe that developers and policymakers will carefully consider privacy issues when designing new contact tracing apps [35]. To this extent, decentralized protocols such as decentralized privacy-preserving proximity tracing (DP-3T) architecture [36] benefit the users with anonymity regarding their health status or their real-time location info. For the same reason, Bluetooth is the optimum solution to the proximity problem, which provides privacy preservation, something that GPS is not capable of doing up to now [3]. Most of the time, location data derived by GPS sensors are tied to known individuals (such as a name associated with a cell phone subscription), or it is tied to a unique identifier associated with a device. In these cases, individualized data is often referred to as \"anonymized.\" In other cases, if a dataset has been modified to show movements of groups of people (and not individuals), which is often referred to as \"aggregated\" [37]. All the gathered data are overly sensitive, and so they are collected with higher security standards than usual. Mobile operators have higher responsibilities on this issue, and furthermore, they have established specific rules regarding COVID-19 LBMAs that they accommodate on both Android and iOS [38].