Governments around the world are utilizing their digital ecosystems to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. To increase awareness among the beneficiaries about privacy risks, they must proactively publish the data handling practices for their digital initiatives through appropriate privacy policies. This study analyzes the privacy policies of public COVID-support mobile applications (apps) in the context of India. We found a total of 63 government initiated COVID-support apps in India out of which 38% were found to have an app-specific privacy policy. These policies were analyzed further to assess their coverage of key principles, such as “Purpose,” “Data Categories,” and “Data Retention,” derived from legal requirements. We also analyzed the extent of the specificity of policies with a high coverage. In India, only one nation-wide app stood out to have both considerable coverage of key principles as well as a high level of specificity. Other national/regional apps fail to display the desired levels of coverage and/or specificity. The broader policy recommendations of this study are that the government should better address privacy concerns regarding its existing and future disaster management apps as well as its other digital initiatives by (a) establishing and enforcing a comprehensive legislative framework for data protection and (b) increasing privacy awareness among the beneficiaries.

中文翻译：

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公共 COVID-19 应用程序隐私政策分析：来自印度的证据

世界各国政府正在利用其数字生态系统来应对 COVID-19 大流行。为了提高受益人对隐私风险的认识，他们必须通过适当的隐私政策主动公布其数字计划的数据处理实践。本研究分析了印度背景下支持 COVID 的公共移动应用程序 (app) 的隐私政策。我们在印度总共发现了 63 个政府发起的 COVID 支持应用程序，其中 38% 被发现具有特定于应用程序的隐私政策。对这些政策进行了进一步分析，以评估其对关键原则的覆盖范围，例如源自法律要求的“目的”、“数据类别”和“数据保留”。我们还分析了具有高覆盖率的政策的特异性程度。在印度，只有一个全国性的应用程序脱颖而出，既涵盖了大量的关键原则，又具有高度的特异性。其他国家/地区应用程序无法显示所需的覆盖率和/或特异性水平。这项研究的更广泛的政策建议是，政府应通过 (a) 建立和执行全面的数据保护立法框架和 (b) 增加受益人的隐私意识。