UK Students' Concerns About Security and Privacy of Online Higher Education Digital Technologies in the Coronavirus Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has led to major changes in higher education around the world. Higher education institutions (HEIs) moved to completely online learning and a range of new technologies including online videoconferencing and chat tools. Research has shown that users have privacy and security concerns about such tools, but little is known about the attitudes of HEI students to these issues, apart from reluctance to use webcams during online teaching. A survey of 71 UK HEI students explored attitudes and concerns about privacy and security in online teaching in the pandemic. Participants knew little about institutional policies on these issues and few had had any training. Ratings of concern across a range of issues were generally low, however in open-ended questions, a range of concerns such as being recorded without permission, unauthorised people entering and disrupting of online sessions, not knowing where recordings are stored and who has access to them. The main concerns about online teaching situations related to being monitored in examinations. HEIs moved very rapidly to deploy online technologies for teaching in response to the pandemic, but going forward, more transparency and information to students could alleviate many of these concerns and create better informed students. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

People Counting in the Times of Covid-19

Estimating the number of people within a public building with multiple entrances is an interesting problem, especially when limitations on building occupancy hold as during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we illustrate the design, prototyping and assessment of an open-source distributed Cloud-IoT service that performs such a task and detects crowd formation via EdgeAI, also accounting for privacy and security concerns. The service is deployed and thoroughly assessed over a low-cost Fog infrastructure, showing an average accuracy of 94%. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

People Counting in the Times of Covid-19

Estimating the number of people within a public building with multiple entrances is an interesting problem, especially when limitations on building occupancy hold as during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we illustrate the design, prototyping and assessment of an open-source distributed Cloud-IoT service that performs such a task and detects crowd formation via EdgeAI, also accounting for privacy and security concerns. The service is deployed and thoroughly assessed over a low-cost Fog infrastructure, showing an average accuracy of 94%. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Technology, Users' Privacy and Security

Nowadays, the entire world is struggling to adapt and survive the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic, the new mutations in the Coronavirus disease is causing damage and disruption across the world. Taking preventive measures to control the spreading of the virus, including lockdowns, curfews, social distancing, masks, vaccination are not enough to stop the virus. Many countries have sought to support their contact tracers with the use of digital contact tracing apps to manage and control the spread of the virus. Using the new technologies to adapt the prevention measures furthermore enhancing the existing ones, will definitely be more efficient. There are many contact tracing apps that have already been launched and used since 2020. There has been a lot of speculations about the confidentiality and security aspects of these apps and their possible violation of data protection principles. In this paper we propose a system of contact tracing, we explain how this system treats sensible information to preserve the user's identity and protect their personal information. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

No Salvation from Trackers: Privacy Analysis of Religious Websites and Mobile Apps

Many religious communities are going online to save costs and reach a large audience to spread their religious beliefs. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, such online transitions have accelerated, primarily to maintain the existence and continuity of religious communities. However, online religious services (e.g., websites and mobile apps) open the door to privacy and security issues that result from tracking and leakage of personal/sensitive information. While web privacy in popular sites (e.g., commercial and social media sites) is widely studied, privacy and security issues of religious online services have not been systematically studied. In this paper, we perform privacy and security measurements in religious websites and Android apps: 62,373 unique websites and 1454 Android apps, pertaining to major religions (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism). We identified the use of commercial trackers on religious websites—e.g., 32% of religious websites and 78% of religious Android apps host Google trackers. Session replay services (FullStory, Yandex, Inspectlet, Lucky Orange) on 198 religious sites sent sensitive information to third parties. Religious sites (14) and apps (7) sent sensitive information in clear text. Besides privacy issues, we also identify sites with potential security issues: 19 religious sites were vulnerable to various security issues;and 69 religious websites and 29 Android apps were flagged by VirusTotal as malicious. We hope our findings will raise awareness of privacy and security issues in online religious services. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Hayyakum (حيَّاكم) - COVID-19 Vaccine Digital Certificate: A Blockchain Approach

As a consequence of the global pandemic, many restrictions and rules were enforced. One predicament was the travel restrictions and requirements put into place with regard to vaccinations. Countries worldwide now require people to be vaccinated upon entry. The process of validating vaccine doses requires lots of paperwork and is inefficient. Blockchain is an uprising technology that is secure and fast at carrying out transactions. We propose implementing vaccine dose verifications between countries through vaccine certificates using Blockchain as an effective solution. The need for a common shared database, avoiding a trusted third party to administrate the network, having several countries involved, ensuring privacy and security, and accountability logs make Blockchain needed in this scenario. Digital vaccine certificates are very sensitive information that must be kept private and secure but accessible to several entities. Blockchain ensures the aforementioned requirements are met while preserving the integrity of the VDCs. This paper describes blockchain technology and its application in digital vaccine certificates. © 2022 IEEE.

Blockchain-Based Patient-to-Patient Health Data Sharing

The Covid-19 pandemic catalyzed many exciting forms of health data sharing. Aside from the institution-to-institution health data sharing among cooperating institutions for research and discovery of insights in healthcare, individual-to-many and individual-to-individual health data sharing also came to the fore. However, the security risks involved here are substantial since health data disclosures can lead to privacy and security breaches or complications. In this research, we present a scheme to enable individuals to share details of medical experiences with other individuals or interested groups. Our system provides the sharing entities with anonymity and thus, facilitates rapid dissemination of empirical insights during public health emergencies like Covid-19. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The Customer Behavior Data Analysis Towards Use of Digital Wallet during Covid-19 Pandemic

Digital wallet has been recognized as one of the comfortable and easily accessible digital payment methods and is well-known throughout the world, even in Indonesia. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been observed that there are changes in the pattern of consumer behavior in the use of digital wallets. The main obj ective of the study is to investigate how consumers feel about digital wallets and what are the numerous factors that influence their decision to utilize digital wallets during the pandemic and help businesses determine whether the implementation of digital wallets will be beneficial for them based on their target markets. The data was collected through a survey made using google forms and distributed to people in Indonesia with using random sampling. The result of the survey shows there is a significant increase in digital wallet usage as it is convenient and efficient in making transactions and users were able to obtain financial benefits from discounts and promotions. Most users find digital wallets to be useful and easy to use. However, there are privacy and security issues that caused people to hesitate or distrust putting their personal and vital information on digital wallet applications. Our study provides opportunity for further research, particularly in the privacy and security aspect of digital wallets to discover or develop the proper strategies and methods which could be used to improve the users trust and sense of security towards digital wallets. © 2022 IEEE.

Design and implementation of a New Blockchain-based digital health passport: A Moroccan case study.

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, the Moroccan Interior and Health Ministries have proposed to use the health pass with a QR code to identify vaccinated people. Additionally, the government suggested a mobile application to control the health passport authenticity. However, the key problem is the possibility of anyone scanning the QR code and figuring out citizens' private information, causing severe issues about individual privacy. In this work, the main contribution is integrating a private Blockchain-based digital health passport to ensure high protection of sensitive information, security and privacy among all the actors (Government, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Health, verifiers) that comply with the CNDP (National Commission for the Control of Personal Data Protection) and the Moroccan Law 09-08. In our proposed architectural framework solution, we identify two types of actors: authorized and unauthorized, to limit and control access to the citizens' personal information. Besides, to preserve individuals' privacy, we adopt on-chain and off-chain storage (Interplanetary File Systems IPFS). In our case, smart contracts improve security and privacy in the health passport verification process. Our system implementation describes the proposed solution to grant individual privacy. To verify and validate our approach, we used Remix-IDE and Ethereum Blockchain to build smart contracts.

Mobile Mental Health Apps: Alternative Intervention or Intrusion?

Mental health is an extremely important subject, especially in these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ubiquitous mobile phones can equip users to supplement psychiatric treatment and manage their mental health. Mobile Mental Health (MMH) apps emerge as an effective alternative to assist with a broad range of psychological disorders filling the much-needed patient-provider accessibility gap. However, it also raises significant concerns with sensitive information leakage. The absence of a transparent privacy policy and lack of user awareness may pose a significant threat to undermining the applicability of such tools. We conducted a multifold study of - 1) Privacy policies (Manually and with Polisis, an automated framework to evaluate privacy policies);2) App permissions;3) Static Analysis for inherent security issues;4) Dynamic Analysis for threat surface and vulnerabilities detection, and 5) Traffic Analysis. Our results indicate that apps' exploitable flaws, dangerous permissions, and insecure data handling pose a potential threat to the users' privacy and security. The Dynamic analysis identified 145 vulnerabilities in 20 top-rated MMH apps where attackers and malicious apps can access sensitive information. 45% of MMH apps use a unique identifier, Hardware Id, which can link a unique id to a particular user and probe users' mental health. Traffic analysis shows that sensitive mental health data can be leaked through insecure data transmission. MMH apps need better scrutiny and regulation for more widespread usage to meet the increasing need for mental health care without being intrusive to the already vulnerable population. © 2022 IEEE.

A Blockchain-based Material Donation Platform

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a worldwide surge in demand for masks, protective clothing, and other epidemic prevention materials. The lack of epidemic prevention materials has put the lives of frontline health care workers at serious risk. However, epidemic prevention materials are not being distributed fairly and efficiently. This, coupled with the occasional scramble for scarce materials, makes epidemic prevention materials scarcer. The traditional centralized donation model makes it difficult to obtain the demand for materials in a timely manner, and the existing blockchain-based donation systems have not improved the efficiency of material donation. Moreover, most of the donation systems do not consider privacy and security issues. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based material donation platform designed and implemented through the Ethereum platform. We solve the difficulty of demand acquisition and improve the transparency of the donation process through blockchain;reduce the possibility of a second disaster and improve the efficiency of material distribution through smart contracts;and protect the privacy and security of the donation process through zero-knowledge proof. We validate the security and efficiency of the proposed epidemic donation platform. © 2022 IEEE.

Current COVID-19 Analysis and Future Pandemics Prediction using Internet of Everything (IoE)

Internet of the Everything (IoE) along with different technologies like Cloud and Arduino UNO is of great use throughout the disaster. We have used the MLX90614 Sensor to send the temperature of the person on the cloud with the help of Arduino UNO. This sensor can assist in discovering all of the humans who have come into touch with the infected people. This IoE generation is also useful in tracking sufferers. For those who are having a high probability of getting infected, their information can be supplied to the healthcare workforce to take further action. The COVID-19 epidemic can be controlled by IoE-stimulated frameworks. IoE answers at the side of far-flung health monitoring. If the disease is found in a suspected person then this information is passed through IoE to the health care team. IoE technology which is used here can be a fantastic way to control epidemics. Here we have maintained the privacy and protection issues in our project. IoE is very well analyzed with growing requirements and for multi-tasking practices. © 2021 IEEE.

The Privacy Paradox-Investigating People's Attitude Towards Privacy in a Time of COVID-19

The advent of digital technologies used as a mechanism to deal with the Covid-19 global pandemic, has raised serious concerns around privacy and security issues. Despite these concerns and the potential risk of data misuse, including third party use, countries around the world have pushed the use and proliferation of contact-tracing applications. However, the success of these contact-tracing applications relies on their adoption and use. A well known phenomenon referred to as privacy paradox is defined as the discrepancy between the expressed privacy concern and the actual behaviour of users when it comes to protect their privacy. In this context, this paper presents a study investigating the privacy paradox in the context of a global pandemic. A national survey has been conducted and the data is analysed to examine people's privacy risk perception. The results show inconsistencies between people's privacy concerns and their actual behaviour that is reflected in their attitude shift of sharing their mobile data during a global pandemic. The study also compiles a list of recommendations for policymakers. © 2022 IEEE.

3D QR Cube for Elderly Information System Design

The worldwide population is aging, even though more and more elderly people are living independently and alone. Moreover, pandemics such as COVID-19 are putting enormous pressure in health care systems all around the world. To deal with the growing elderly population and health care challenges, there is an emerging focus on technology and IT products. Technology such as mobile devices with their ever-increasing computational power, and differing sensors show immense usefulness for elderly as well as people with disability. This study proposes the development of 3D QR codes for improved safety, security, and customization of user interfaces. This study proposes multiple QR codes aligned together to create a QR cube (or QR cuboid) to store an increasing amount of information about the user. Individual QR codes will be compatible with existing systems. On the other hand, nearly, all individual information is stored with the user, enabling better privacy. Even with the development of future technologies, QR cubes can be used to access digital information. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

LES MISERABLES: The tale of COVID-19 and role of information

As researchers, scientists, and the general public strive to understand and manage COVID-19, many people search the internet for clues that might help them understand and react to the virus in an informed manner. Social media has become a primary source of news for many, but it can also be a hindrance in managing crisis situations due to the prevalence of fake news. This paper reports on a survey administered to social media users during the first wave of the pandemic to identify perceptions and areas of conflict that influenced society's ability to understand and contain the pandemic. Applying conflict resolution theory to the survey results enabled us to identify major issues related to the management of COVID-19, from which we made recommendations for the roles that information systems research can play in handling future pandemics or other crises. The recommendations are divided into the two general categories of media trust and crisis containment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Employment-at-Will in the United States and the Challenges of Remote Work in the Time of COVID-19

How should employers and employees negotiate the strange and unexpected issues that COVID-19 has forced us to confront in the past two years? Remote work, in particular, has dramatically changed the dynamic of many people's jobs, often altering the tasks and boundaries of employment, blurring the lines between work and home, public and private. U.S. employment law, and particularly the powerful employment-at-will doctrine, sets a clear standard but can sometimes be a blunt instrument. Is there any nuance to be found, or to be desired, from employers in these unprecedented times of COVID-19? We will discuss the doctrine of employment-at-will, the standard it creates for American employment, and the various exceptions to it that have arisen over the past several decades. We will then examine a couple of hypothetical workplace scenarios that could arise in a work-from-home environment, discuss how current law would address them, and whether the letter of the law is the best source of guidance in these matters. We will further discuss the challenges faced by many companies as they attempt to deal with these abrupt changes to their working environments. What are the effects, if any, on long-standing employment traditions and practices? What are the legal issues that may arise from them?

COVID-19 information-Tracking solutions: A qualitative investigation of the factors influencing people's adoption intention

Numerous information-Tracking solutions have been implemented worldwide to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. While prior work has heavily explored the factors affecting people's willingness to adopt contact-Tracing solutions, which inform people when they have been exposed to someone positive for COVID-19, numerous countries have implemented other information-Tracking solutions that use more data and more sensitive data than these commonly studied contact-Tracing apps. In this work, we build on existing work focused on contact-Tracing apps to explore adoption and design considerations for six representative information-Tracking solutions for COVID-19, which differ in their goals and in the types of information they collect. To do so, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 44 participants to investigate the factors that influence their willingness to adopt these solutions. We find four main categories of influences on participants' willingness to adopt such solutions: individual benefits of the solution, societal benefits of the solution, functionality concern, and digital safety (e.g., security and privacy) concerns. Further, we enumerate the factors that inform participants' evaluations of these categories. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for the future design of information-Tracking solutions and discuss how different factors may balance against benefits in future crisis situations. © 2022 ACM.

A Review on IOT Response to COVID-19 Pandemic, Challenges and Open Issues

In the history of humanity, we have never faced an invisible enemy like the COVID-19 pandemic. The medical field has never been overwhelmed so much. Scientists and engineers are working around the clock to develop a suitable vaccine for COVID-19. In order to fight this pandemic technology will need to be utilized to its full potential. A fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technology, called the Internet of things (IOT), is an interconnection of physical devices and the Internet, has been identified to fight the battle against COVID-19. Numerous papers have been written about the Internet of things technology and how the technology can be use in different environments, thereof it is imperative to review how this technology can be utilize in the the response to COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we examined literature on the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) and IOT technologies that can fight COVID-19 to minimize its spread. Various challenges and open issues related to the used of the technology in the fight of COVID-19 where identified and discussed, such as security and privacy issue, limited spectrum and bandwidth, scalability and interoperability as a threat. This technology can be recommended for use in a pandemic period. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Bridging the Health Disparity of African Americans through Conversational Agents

African Americans have faced health disparities in terms of access to health care and treatment of illnesses. The novel coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic exacerbates those disparities caused by limited access to medical care and healthy lifestyles, vulnerability to misleading information, and mistrust of the medical profession, all of which disproportionately affect the African American population in terms of infection and mortality. Conversational agents (CAs) are a technological intervention with the potential to narrow the disparities because they make health care more accessible, are effective in disseminating health information among a population with low health literacy, and can increase users' trust in health information. However, designing CAs for this population presents challenges with regard to embodying the African American culture into CAs and addressing privacy and security concerns. This commentary discusses some advantages and challenges of using CAs to help African Americans protect themselves against coronavirus disease 2019, and calls for more research in this area. © 2020 ACM.

Contagious Patient Tracking Application Spotlight: Privacy and Security Rights

As the Covid-19 outbreak spreads across the globe and has killed many lives, many applications have been created to track patients and fight this pandemic. However, several applications lack safety and privacy. This paper designs and develops a mobile app to track patients with the Covid-19 or any other pandemic disease through using GPS in Iraq. Moreover, the app maintains a privacy for users by encrypting their personal data before sending them to the cloud using a MODE CBC AES block encryption algorithm. The app keeps the identity and location of the users, supports two language interfaces English and Arabic, and works in Android and iOS environments. Only the health care providers can decrypt these data and know about the patient's location. Also, to make the patient trusts the application, his/her information will be deleted after sending his/her negative test after 21 days. In addition, the app provides users with information regarding healthcare places in the case of emergency. For the evaluation of this app, a data was collected from 20 users, including males and females and their ages were between (20-50) in Mosul city. The results showed that the app works properly and the users are notified when they are in close with other registered infected people. In addition, the users found that the app was simple, easy to use, and useful to do contact safely. To convince the users to utilize this app, the app is provided with button trial option to try it. © 2021 IEEE.