Redefining the way journalists and researchers discover COVID-19 symptom tracking and contact tracing applications.

Role: UX Designer and Front-End Developer

Tools: Figma, GitHub, React JS

Year: 2020

The problem

Researchers, privacy advocates, journalists, and the general public are concerned about the growing number of COVID-19 contact-tracing and symptom-tracking applications and the transparency these apps give their users about the data they are collecting. The two primary issues surrounding these applications are how privacy data is being used and the security implications of having so many users inputting data into a system that was so hastily implemented.

Defining goals

Create a web application that autonomously aggregates and scrapes the Google Play Store to allow researchers and interested parties to conduct further research into said application(s).

Overview

An easy-to-use visual database that researchers, privacy advocates, journalists, and interested parties can use as a jumping-off point for COVID-19 applications on the Google Play Store (globally) that fall under the following categories: contact tracing, symptom tracking, and COVID-19 information.

Website: covid19apptracker.org

Our presentation at DEFCON 2020

    Application updates

    During our testing, we found that users wanted to know when Covid19 applications were updated, so they could tell if the application was kept up to date or severely outdated.

    Dangerous permissions

    Once we listed application permissions on the details page, users wanted to understand which permissions were more consequential than others since some applications asked for six or more permissions.

    Privacy policies

    A request we got specifically from researchers and journalists, was to add the privacy policies listed on the Google Play Store for each application on the details page in order for them to dive deeper into how each application collected data.