Privacy Analysis of Corona Apps

WU Institute for IS & Society

This project was an effort of Professor Spiekermann to use state-of-the-art privacy-by-design knowledge to investigate the relative merit of competitive approaches to Corona App design. Corona apps have born the potential to be massive surveillance tools and European countries made efforts to avoid this surveillance. As a result, it was necessary to understand the various dimensions of app design that allow to build the health tracking tool in a more or less privacy friendly way. Professor Spiekermann build a privacy-by-design benchmarking tool and compared Austrian, German and Italian Corona apps to support authorities in their judgement of the national approach. The tool was circulated with the Data Protection Authorities and various stakeholders active on the topic.