The urgency of the need to manage and find cures for the COVID-19 pandemic has made it necessary to share information in large volumes between national and international organizations (e.g., virus and treatment data, contact tracing, multimedia data generated by telepresence applications such as Zoom, Teams, etc.). The sharing of information will lead to the transfer of big data, which inevitably will infringe on individual privacy. Therefore, the transfer of big data in this way whether permissible under extenuation circumstances or not, requires added responsibility and the need to protect privacy cannot be ignored. This is just one recent example use of Big Data in a pandemic situation and we may need more efficient organizational and technical measures to tackle security and privacy issues of Big Data applications in the era of COVID-19. The increased use of Internet, IoE and IoT sensors, advancement of 5G networks and increased computing powers at edge devices will make the problem worse. Furthermore, Big Data privacy and security solutions during the period of COVID-19 need brand new start to comply with more stern data security laws and regulations (e.g. GDPR) across the world. The purpose of this special issue is to publish high-quality research papers reporting original research as well as review articles that highlight the security and privacy impact of emerging Big Data applications and use cases and provide new ideas and solutions for meeting such challenges during the era of COVID-19 pandemic.