Investigating COVID-19 Tracing Apps as e-Government Service in European Context

ABSTRACT

This article aims to identify which European countries have been developed applications as an e-government service to control the COVID-19 pandemic. As a starting point, we use official data from the European Council to map countries that have at some point implemented or developed applications to combat the pandemic. In addition, we have identified the main functionalities and categories of the applications in contact tracking, medical reports, self-diagnosis, health information, exposure detection, quarantine application, route tracking, scientific and educational research. The methodology is based on an exploratory study, providing a qualitative method of analysis. First, we analyse whether applications are available for download on official websites as well as whether they are present on government social networks and, in addition, identifying the origin of applications categorized as government, private or multi-stakeholders. We concluded that 63% of developed applications are in the category of ' contact tracking ', followed by' medical report 'which corresponds to 15%. However, the category 'root tracking' corresponds to only 2% due to the data protection implications of the users. Thus, we found that although most applications had government support in their elaboration, they were not available for download on the official websites, so that, in the context of this investigation, they could not be considered as an e-government tools, and that data protection and privacy has had a negative impact on the development of this kind of solution, which implies the limitation of the applications functionalities. © 2021 ACM.