  Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, there has been
increased interest in the use of digital contact tracing as a means of stopping
chains of viral transmission, provoking alarm from privacy advocates.
Concerning the ethics of this technology, recent studies have predominantly
focused on (1) the formation of guidelines for ethical contact tracing, (2) the
analysis of specific implementations, or (3) the review of a select number of
contact tracing applications and their relevant privacy or ethical
implications. In this study, we provide a comprehensive survey of the evolving
ecosystem of COVID-19 tracing applications, examining 152 contact tracing
applications and assessing the extent to which they comply with existing
guidelines for ethical contact tracing. The assessed criteria cover areas
including data collection and storage, transparency and consent, and whether
the implementation is open source. We find that although many apps released
early in the pandemic fell short of best practices, apps released more
recently, following the publication of the Apple/Google exposure notification
protocol, have tended to be more closely aligned with ethical contact tracing
principles. This dataset will be publicly available and may be updated as the
pandemic continues.
