Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, there has been increased interest in the use of digital contact tracing as a means of stopping chains of viral transmission, provoking alarm from privacy advocates. Concerning the ethics of this technology, recent studies have predominantly focused on (1) the formation of guidelines for ethical contact tracing, (2) the analysis of specific implementations, or (3) the review of a select number of contact tracing applications and their relevant privacy or ethical implications. In this study, we provide a comprehensive survey of the evolving ecosystem of COVID-19 tracing applications, examining 152 contact tracing applications and assessing the extent to which they comply with existing guidelines for ethical contact tracing. The assessed criteria cover areas including data collection and storage, transparency and consent, and whether the implementation is open source. We find that although many apps released early in the pandemic fell short of best practices, apps released more recently, following the publication of the Apple/Google exposure notification protocol, have tended to be more closely aligned with ethical contact tracing principles. This dataset will be publicly available and may be updated as the pandemic continues.

翻译：自新科罗纳病毒(COVID-19)爆发以来,人们越来越关心利用数字联系追踪作为阻止病毒传播链的手段,引起隐私倡导者的警觉;关于这一技术的伦理学,最近的研究主要侧重于:(1) 制定道德联系追踪准则,(2) 分析具体执行情况,或(3) 审查若干接触追踪应用及其相关的隐私或伦理影响;在本研究中,我们全面调查了COVID-19追踪应用的不断发展的生态系统,审查了152项接触追踪应用,并评估了它们遵守现有伦理联系追踪准则的程度;评估的标准涵盖数据收集和储存、透明度和同意以及执行是否公开的来源等领域;我们发现,虽然许多在大流行病初期发布的应用没有最佳做法,但在苹果/戈格勒接触通知协议公布后,最近发布的应用往往与道德联系追踪原则更加接近;这一数据集将公开提供,并随着大流行病的继续更新。