Critical Overview of the Use of Contact Tracing Apps in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Contact tracing determines the chain of contacts of an infected person to isolate them. Implementing contact tracing requires an enormous effort that generally falls on the different governments and their respective health authorities. Emerging technologies can be quite useful in supporting contact tracing. The most relevant advantages of using mobile applications based on digital technologies to perform contact tracing are the fast collection of reliable data and the rapid detection of possible contacts at risk. However, despite these advantages, many countries have not reported a high penetration of these tools. As a relevant and actual research area, this paper presents a critical overview of the current literature regarding contact tracing applications to answer the following research questions: What is the most used technology to develop contact tracing apps? What were the main lessons on using contact tracing applications so far?, How are ethics, privacy, and security issues handled?, What is the use that is given to the data collected by the applications, and what happens to them? Who applies these types of tools, and what implications did they have?