This paper presents results from a privacy analysis of COVID-19 contact tracing apps developed within the EU. Though these apps have been termed advantageous, concerns regarding privacy have become an issue that has led to their slow adoption. In this empirical study, we perform both static and dynamic analysis to judge apps’ privacy-preserving behavior together with the analysis of the privacy and data protection goals to deduce their transparency and intervenability. From the results, we discover that while the apps aim to be privacy-preserving, not all adhere to this as we observe one tracks users’ location, while the other violates the principle of least privilege, data minimisation and transparency, which puts the users’ at risk by invading their privacy.© 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.