scholarly journals COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Apps: Analysis of the Readability of Privacy Policies (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn Zhang ◽  
Aloysius Chow ◽  
Helen Smith
Keyword(s):  
Reading Ability ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Rapid Identification ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Sensitive Data ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Flesch Reading Ease ◽  
Reading Grade Level ◽  
Complex Words

UNSTRUCTURED Apps that enable contact-tracing are instrumental in mitigating the transmission of COVID-19, but there have been concerns among users about the data collected by these apps and their management. Contact tracing is of paramount importance when dealing with a pandemic, as it allows for rapid identification of cases based on the information collected from infected individuals about other individuals they may have had recent contact with. Advances in digital technology have enabled devices such as mobile phones to be used in the contract-tracing process. However, there is a potential risk of users’ personal information and sensitive data being stolen should hackers be in the near vicinity of these devices. Thus, there is a need to develop privacy-preserving apps. Meanwhile, privacy policies that outline the risk associated with the use of contact-tracing apps are needed, in formats that are easily readable and comprehensible by the public. To our knowledge, no previous study has examined the readability of privacy policies of contact-tracings apps. Therefore, we performed a readability analysis to evaluate the comprehensibility of privacy policies of 7 contact-tracing apps currently in use. The contents of the privacy policies of these apps were assessed for readability using Readability Test Tool, a free web-based reliability calculator, which computes scores based on a number of statistics (ie, word count and the number of complex words) and indices (ie, Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, and Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook index). Our analysis revealed that explanations used in the privacy policies of these apps require a reading grade between 7 and 14, which is considerably higher than the reading ability of the average individual. We believe that improving the readability of privacy policies of apps could be potentially reassuring for users and may help facilitate the increased use of such apps.

scholarly journals 如何平衡治理效率與隱私保護？中國和新加坡新冠病毒接觸者追蹤應用程式隱私政策的文本分析

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-143
Author(s):  
Bian XIONG ◽  
Fen LIN
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Information Storage ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Limited Information ◽  
Data Governance ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Authorized User ◽  
Balancing Efficiency

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.新冠病毒疫情催生了以中國的“健康碼”和新加坡的“TraceTogether”為代表的接觸者追蹤應用程式在全球的應用和擴散。如何利用人工智慧科技，在資料治理中平衡效率與隱私倫理的闢係，成為使用數位追蹤工具進行疫情治理的國家共同面對的難題。兩國法律都規定，在收集個人資訊前必須向個人資訊主體明確告知所收集的個人資訊類型、使用個人資訊的規則，並獲得個人資訊主體的授權同意。本文通過對“健康碼”和“TraceTogether”隱私政策的對比分析發現，在應用 上，中國健康碼的使用有效幫助防控疫情，但是收集的個人資訊範園廣、處理目的多、存儲時間不明確、隱私政策内容較含糊、知情同意流於形式。新加坡的“TraceTogether”則更好地遵守了資訊收集最少夠用、資訊處理目的限定、資訊存儲時間最小化、隱私政策公開透明、知情同意等原則。中國和新加坡兩種利用資料抗疫的糢式表明，風險社會裡的資料治理需要進一步調和公共利益與個人權利，平衡治理效率和資料倫理的邊界。The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned the spread of contact-tracing applications such as China's “Health Code” and Singapore’s “TraceTogether.” Balancing efficiency and privacy ethics in data governance has become a common problem faced by all countries using digital tracing tools to control the pandemic. The laws of both China and Singapore stipulate that prior to collecting personal information, organizations and institutions must clearly inform individuals about the types of personal information collected and the rules for the use of personal information, and must obtain authorized user consent. This article analyzes the privacy policies of Health Code in China and TraceTogether in Singapore and identifies five potential problems in Health Code’s privacy policies: the broad collection of personal information, multiple processing purposes, indeterminate storage time, ambiguous privacy policy content, and the ineffectiveness of informed consent, although Health Code has been deemed an efficient tool to fight against the pandemic. Singapore’s TraceTogether adheres to the principles of minimum information collection, limited information processing purposes, minimum duration of information storage, openness and transparency of privacy policies, and informed consent. These two models for using big data in the fight against the pandemic in China and Singapore suggest that data governance needs to reconcile public interests and individual rights, and should balance governance efficiency and data ethics.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 69 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Fraud Detection Protocol for Web-Based Research Among Men Who Have Sex With Men: Development and Descriptive Evaluation (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
April M Ballard ◽  
Trey Cardwell ◽  
April M Young
Keyword(s):  
Survey Research ◽  
Hiv Transmission ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Fraud Detection ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Young Msm ◽  
Data Survey ◽  
Sex With Men

BACKGROUND Internet is becoming an increasingly common tool for survey research, particularly among “hidden” or vulnerable populations, such as men who have sex with men (MSM). Web-based research has many advantages for participants and researchers, but fraud can present a significant threat to data integrity. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this analysis was to evaluate fraud detection strategies in a Web-based survey of young MSM and describe new protocols to improve fraud detection in Web-based survey research. METHODS This study involved a cross-sectional Web-based survey that examined individual- and network-level risk factors for HIV transmission and substance use among young MSM residing in 15 counties in Central Kentucky. Each survey entry, which was at least 50% complete, was evaluated by the study staff for fraud using an algorithm involving 8 criteria based on a combination of geolocation data, survey data, and personal information. Entries were classified as fraudulent, potentially fraudulent, or valid. Descriptive analyses were performed to describe each fraud detection criterion among entries. RESULTS Of the 414 survey entries, the final categorization resulted in 119 (28.7%) entries identified as fraud, 42 (10.1%) as potential fraud, and 253 (61.1%) as valid. Geolocation outside of the study area (164/414, 39.6%) was the most frequently violated criterion. However, 33.3% (82/246) of the entries that had ineligible geolocations belonged to participants who were in eligible locations (as verified by their request to mail payment to an address within the study area or participation at a local event). The second most frequently violated criterion was an invalid phone number (94/414, 22.7%), followed by mismatching names within an entry (43/414, 10.4%) and unusual email addresses (37/414, 8.9%). Less than 5% (18/414) of the entries had some combination of personal information items matching that of a previous entry. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests that researchers conducting Web-based surveys of MSM should be vigilant about the potential for fraud. Researchers should have a fraud detection algorithm in place prior to data collection and should not rely on the Internet Protocol (IP) address or geolocation alone, but should rather use a combination of indicators.

scholarly journals A first look at Android applications in Google Play related to COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Samhi ◽  
Kevin Allix ◽  
Tegawendé F. Bissyandé ◽  
Jacques Klein
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Location Tracking ◽  
Response Effort ◽  
Sensitive Data ◽  
Android Apps ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Public Health Organizations ◽  
Android Applications ◽  
Google Play

AbstractDue to the convenience of access-on-demand to information and business solutions, mobile apps have become an important asset in the digital world. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, app developers have joined the response effort in various ways by releasing apps that target different user bases (e.g., all citizens or journalists), offer different services (e.g., location tracking or diagnostic-aid), provide generic or specialized information, etc. While many apps have raised some concerns by spreading misinformation or even malware, the literature does not yet provide a clear landscape of the different apps that were developed. In this study, we focus on the Android ecosystem and investigate Covid-related Android apps. In a best-effort scenario, we attempt to systematically identify all relevant apps and study their characteristics with the objective to provide a first taxonomy of Covid-related apps, broadening the relevance beyond the implementation of contact tracing. Overall, our study yields a number of empirical insights that contribute to enlarge the knowledge on Covid-related apps: (1) Developer communities contributed rapidly to the COVID-19, with dedicated apps released as early as January 2020; (2) Covid-related apps deliver digital tools to users (e.g., health diaries), serve to broadcast information to users (e.g., spread statistics), and collect data from users (e.g., for tracing); (3) Covid-related apps are less complex than standard apps; (4) they generally do not seem to leak sensitive data; (5) in the majority of cases, Covid-related apps are released by entities with past experience on the market, mostly official government entities or public health organizations.

Automated Extraction and Presentation of Data Practices in Privacy Policies

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-110
Author(s):  
Duc Bui ◽  
Kang G. Shin ◽  
Jong-Min Choi ◽  
Junbum Shin
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Neural Model ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Automated System ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Data Practices

Abstract Privacy policies are documents required by law and regulations that notify users of the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information on services or applications. While the extraction of personal data objects and their usage thereon is one of the fundamental steps in their automated analysis, it remains challenging due to the complex policy statements written in legal (vague) language. Prior work is limited by small/generated datasets and manually created rules. We formulate the extraction of fine-grained personal data phrases and the corresponding data collection or sharing practices as a sequence-labeling problem that can be solved by an entity-recognition model. We create a large dataset with 4.1k sentences (97k tokens) and 2.6k annotated fine-grained data practices from 30 real-world privacy policies to train and evaluate neural networks. We present a fully automated system, called PI-Extract, which accurately extracts privacy practices by a neural model and outperforms, by a large margin, strong rule-based baselines. We conduct a user study on the effects of data practice annotation which highlights and describes the data practices extracted by PI-Extract to help users better understand privacy-policy documents. Our experimental evaluation results show that the annotation significantly improves the users’ reading comprehension of policy texts, as indicated by a 26.6% increase in the average total reading score.

The complication of cyber manhunt: How cyber manhunt further complicated the ethical conflict between breaching the confidentiality and endangering the society in face of the COVID-19 pandemic (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen-Chang Chen ◽  
Yen-Yuan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Public Health Intervention ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Online Activity ◽  
Contact Investigation ◽  
The Impact

UNSTRUCTURED While health care and public health workers are working on measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an unprecedentedly large number of people spending much more time indoors, and relying heavily on the Internet as their lifeline. What has been overlooked is the influence of the increasing online activities on public health issues. In this article, we pointed out how a large-scale online activity called cyber manhunt may threaten to offset the efficacy of contact tracing investigation, a public health intervention considered highly effective in limiting further transmission in the early stage of a highly contagious disease outbreak such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first section, we presented a case to show how personal information obtained from contact investigation and disclosed in part on the media provoked a vehement cyber manhunt. We then discussed the possible reasons why netizens collaborate to reveal anonymized personal information about contact investigation, and specify, from the perspective of public health and public health ethics, four problems of cyber manhunt, including the lack of legitimate public health goals, the concerns about privacy breach, the impact of misinformation, and social inequality. Based on our analysis, we concluded that more moral weight may be given to protecting one's confidentiality, especially in an era with the rapid advance of digital and information technologies.

scholarly journals Miscue Analysis of Oral Reading Among Non-Proficient Malaysian ESL Learners

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-185
Author(s):  
Adeena Deepa Ramakrishna Pillai ◽  
Shamala Paramasivam
Keyword(s):  
Oral Reading ◽  
Reading Ability ◽  
Direct Method ◽  
Multiple Choice ◽  
Miscue Analysis ◽  
Multiple Choice Questions ◽  
Microsoft Excel ◽  
Reading Material ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
Esl Learners

Reading is a vital skill. Research has shown that proficient learners usually have a greater comprehension of the reading material. This study focuses on non-proficient learners’ oral reading as a direct method of assessing their reading ability. Miscue analysis is used as a tool to gather information and measure strategies used in reading and comprehending a given material. The study investigates the types and frequencies of miscues made by learners when they orally read texts and assesses learners’ comprehension based on the oral reading through the use of multiple-choice questions. The number of miscues made and the scores for the multiple choice questions are patterned using Microsoft Excel program and are converted into percentages. This study found that when the number of miscues made by the learners reduced during the oral reading process, the scores on the comprehension section did not necessarily improve. The types of miscues made by learners were omission of words namely plural and past-tense endings of verbs, substitution of words such as the pronoun ‘she’ with ‘he’, and hesitation especially with complex words. The findings imply that learners have language problems in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and the use of reading strategies.

The Role of Trust in Covid Tracing Apps: Estonian Case Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Sousa ◽  
Tiina Kalju
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Security And Privacy ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
P Value ◽  
Sensitive Data ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
The World ◽  
Wide Availability

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has caused changes on how we use technology across the world, both socially and economically. Due to the urgency and severity of the crisis different virus control measures were explored. One of the means how technology could help in this situation was by helping trace the contacts of people to prevent the spread of the disease. Many governments and public health authorities across the world have launched a number of contact tracing mobile apps (CTA). By the end of 2020, there are more than 50 contact tracing apps in both Google Play and iOS App Store [1]. Despite the wide availability, the download rates are low and usage rates are even lower [2][3]. There could be many reasons why the adoption is so low, but most certainly one variable that has been overlooked is the level of trust that potential users need to feel comfortable using an app. In Estonia, the CTA named HOIA has been developed as a means of digital contact tracing. By the middle of January 2021, there have been approximately 250 000 downloads but only 1763 (around 4,7% of all COVID-19 positive in Estonia by that time) people have registered as being tested COVID-19 positive [4]. It shows that HOIA has not proved to be efficient means to reduce the spread of the pandemic. Modeling evidence suggests that in order to be effective, the use of contact tracing apps would need to be very high, at least 80% of smartphone users to stop the pandemic [5]. 40% of Estonian people who don’t have HOIA do not believe that HOIA is effective and does what is promised. The concern about security and privacy was in the second place [6]. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to assess Estonian's trust towards the HOIA app and what has caused the shortage in trust. Namely, assess how much Estonians trust Covid-19 contact tracing app HOIA and what aspects are perceived as distrust by them. The study contributes to designers' understanding and awareness of designing trustworthy technology. METHODS The study comprised of measuring trust in HOIA CTA application using human-computer Trust psychometric scale [22]. A convenience sample was used in data collection, this includes all potential HOIA among the Estonian population. RESULTS Results indicate significant positive correlations between participants' trust towards the Estonian COVID tracing application (HOIA) and their perceptions of risk (p-value 0.000), competency (P-value 0.000), Benevolence (P-value=0.025), and reciprocity (P-value 0.015). CONCLUSIONS With the COVID-19 crisis, the new phenomenon of contact tracing apps was introduced to fight against the pandemic. CTAs were hoped to be a technological breakthrough to decrease the spread of the virus. However, this has not happened around the world. The same has happened in Estonia and evidence shows, that one of the reasons could be the low level of trust. The results of the study confirm, that trust in HOIA among Estonian habitants does affect their predisposition to use and indicated that participants do not believe HOIA is able to fulfill the main goal and decrease the spread of the virus. The result of this work is not only limited to HOIA but can be implemented by other CTAs as well. The results of this study contribute to designers' understanding and awareness of designing trustworthy technology. Eventually helps to provide design recommendations that ensure trustworthiness in the CTAs AI ability to use highly sensitive data and serve society. Regarding the limitations of this study, the survey was able to gather insight about the perceptions of HOIA, was enough to make a statistical generalization about the users’ perception and usage habits but more data needs to be collected if the intention is to generalize the results to the whole population of Estonia. Also, we should pay attention to the different minority groups to reach a valid conclusion. CLINICALTRIAL no trial registration.

Bridging the gap between respiratory research and health literacy: an interactive web-based platform

2020 ◽  
pp. bmjstel-2020-000678
Author(s):  
Kelly Burrowes ◽  
Haribalan Kumar ◽  
Alys Clark ◽  
Taco de Wolff ◽  
Merryn Tawhai
Keyword(s):  
Health Literacy ◽  
Respiratory Disease ◽  
Computer Modelling ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Respiratory Physiology ◽  
Smoking History ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Lung Structure ◽  
And Function

Many patients with respiratory disease lack an understanding of basic respiratory physiology and the changes occurring in their lungs due to disease. Describing how the lungs work using realistic 3D visualisation of lung structure and function will improve communication of complicated concepts, resulting in improved health literacy. We developed a web-based platform, using anatomically realistic 3D lung models, to create an interactive visualisation tool to improve health literacy for patients with respiratory disease. A small amount of non-identifying personal information including gender, age, weight, height and smoking history can be used to customise the visualisation to an individual user. 3D computer modelling was used to create a web-based application that helps people understand how their lungs work in health and disease. The web-based application includes pages describing and visualising how the lungs work and the changes that occur during asthma and damage that smoking may be doing to their lungs. The application is freely available and located at https://sites.bioeng.auckland.ac.nz/silo6/lung_new/. This application bridges the gap between computational modelling and patient education, giving a visually compelling view into the patient’s body that cannot be provided with any existing tools, hence providing a novel platform for enhancing patient–clinician interaction.

Information Privacy

2013 ◽  
pp. 52-69
Author(s):  
Garry L. White ◽  
Francis A. Méndez Mediavilla ◽  
Jaymeen R. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Personal Information ◽  
The United States ◽  
Information Privacy ◽  
Multinational Companies ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Corporate Managers ◽  
Secondary Use ◽  
Privacy Laws ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
Corporate Information

In the Web dependent world, companies must respect and protect individuals’ information privacy. Companies develop and implement corporate information privacy policies to comply with the domestic and international information privacy laws and regulations. This paper investigates: (a) the approach used by multinational and domestic companies to develop and implement corporate information privacy policies; and (b) the perception of corporate managers/professionals toward information privacy legislation and secondary use of personally identifiable information (PII) that organizations collect. A survey was conducted to collect data from corporate CEOs, managers, and technical professionals of national and multinational companies. Findings indicate the following: 1) Views regarding the practicality and effectiveness of information privacy legislations are similar for respondents from the national and multinational companies. 2) Respondents are undecided about whether the privacy laws of the United States and foreign countries are equally restrictive. 3) Multinational companies do not favor developing and implementing uniform information privacy policies or different information privacy policies across countries of operations. 4) Respondents strongly agreed that unauthorized secondary use of personal information is unacceptable.

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