Covid-19 digital Contact-tracing: a doorway to well-being or a backdoor to security vulnerabilities?

Digital Contact-tracing through mobile applications require gathering of location and other personal information of an individual by the government or private organizations and became an essential solution for moderating the pandemic and slackening lockdown measures. However, the moral and legal boundaries for such privacy-sensitive information reconnaissance procedure and the ambiguity in the security measures of such technologies has gained controversial reputation.In this work, we performed static profiling of 10 different Android Contact-tracing applications, developed by the health departments of 10 different states within the United States and studied possible security threats posed by them. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to heuristically analyze the users’ attitude towards these applications to understand the user-perceived contribution of these apps towards their well-being. We collected user feedback for each of the apps and trained a logistic regression classifier on cleaned, pre-processed and vectorized texts to identify positive or negative outlook towards these apps. Using the confusion matrix, our predictive model showed up to 85% accuracy, 94% precision, 93% recall and 83% f1 score. in predicting the sentiments. The sentiment prediction shows, users in some states did find the apps to be helpful where some other states found them wasteful. Whereas, our static analysis shows none of the apps are malicious themselves but all of them request permission that can be abused to gain escalated privileges.