# COVID-19 vs Social Media Apps: Does Privacy Really Matter?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01779 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01779/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Does a Face Mask Protect my Privacy?: Deep Learning to Predict Protected Attributes from Masked Face Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07879/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many people around the world are worried about using or even downloading COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps. The main reported concerns are centered around privacy and ethical issues. At the same time, people are voluntarily using Social Media apps at a significantly higher rate during the pandemic without similar privacy concerns compared with COVID-19 apps. To better understand these seemingly anomalous behaviours, we analysed the privacy policies, terms & conditions and data use agreements of the most commonly used COVID-19, Social Media & Productivity apps. We also developed a tool to extract and analyse nearly 2 million user reviews for these apps. Our results show that Social Media & Productivity apps actually have substantially higher privacy and ethical issues compared with the majority of COVID-19 apps. Surprisingly, lots of people indicated in their user reviews that they feel more secure as their privacy are better handled in COVID-19 apps than in Social Media apps. On the other hand, most of the COVID-19 apps are less accessible and stable compared to most Social Media apps, which negatively impacted their store ratings and led users to uninstall COVID-19 apps more frequently. Our findings suggest that in order to effectively fight this pandemic, health officials and technologists will need to better raise awareness among people about COVID-19 app behaviour and trustworthiness. This will allow people to better understand COVID-19 apps and encourage them to download and use these apps. Moreover, COVID-19 apps need many accessibility enhancements to allow a wider range of users from different societies and cultures to access to these apps.