  Today's smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added
sensors and features such as a low power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded
sensors such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi
capabilities, microphone, humidity sensors, health tracking sensors, and a
camera, etc. These value-added sensors have revolutionized the lives of the
human being in many ways such, as tracking the health of the patients and
movement of doctors, tracking employees movement in large manufacturing units,
and monitoring the environment, etc. These embedded sensors could also be used
for large-scale personal, group, and community sensing applications especially
tracing the spread of certain diseases. Governments and regulators are turning
to use these features to trace the people thought to have symptoms of certain
diseases or virus e.g. COVID-19. The outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, has
seen a surge of the mobile applications for tracing, tracking and isolating the
persons showing COVID-19 symptoms to limit the spread of disease to the larger
community. The use of embedded sensors could disclose private information of
the users thus potentially bring threat to the privacy and security of users.
In this paper, we analyzed a large set of smartphone applications that have
been designed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and bring the people
back to normal life. Specifically, we have analyzed what type of permission
these smartphone apps require, whether these permissions are necessary for the
track and trace, how data from the user devices is transported to the analytic
center, and analyzing the security measures these apps have deployed to ensure
the privacy and security of users.
