Security News > 2020 > April > Apple, Google Team on Coronavirus Tracking – Sparking Privacy Fears

Despite the companies' insistence that privacy will be "Of utmost importance," some in the security space remain wary of data privacy concerns around the newly announced technology.

Many such coronavirus tracking apps are already available, such as COVID Symptom Tracker and Private Kit SafePaths.

The data linked to the identifier beacons "Will only be used for contact tracing by public health authorities for COVID-19 pandemic management," said Google and Apple.

The ACLU earlier this week for instance released a report, called "The Limits of Location Tracing in an Epidemic," detailing the issues with phone-location tracking as a solution to contain coronavirus - including whether data is anonymous, who gets to access the data, how the data is used and what the lifecycle of the data is.

Moving forward, Google and Apple stress that they will continue to make their work available around coronavirus contact tracing for analysis.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/apple-google-coronavirus-tracking-privacy-fears/154689/