Americans' perceptions of privacy and surveillance in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Baobao Zhang, Sarah E. Kreps and Nina McMurry
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Baobao Zhang: Yale University

No 9wz3y, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: As COVID-19 continues to spread, some public health authorities have implemented or plan to implement smartphone apps to supplement traditional contact tracing. These apps are more effective if a higher percentage of the public downloads and uses them. Yet fears that these apps would violate users' privacy by expanding governments' and tech companies' surveillance capacity may limit adoption. We conducted a study of American attitudes (N≈2,000) toward public health surveillance policies, focusing on smartphone contact tracing apps. We find widespread reluctance among the public: support for contact tracing apps is lower than for expanding traditional contact tracing or introducing new measures like temperature checks. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in the survey, we found that decentralized data storage increased the public's acceptance of contact tracing apps. Only a minority of respondents support the government, employers, and places of religious worship requiring smartphone users to download and use these apps. Despite partisan splits on traditional contact tracing and wearing face masks, Democrats and Republicans converge on levels of support for contact tracing apps, suggesting that bipartisan elite cues could work to augment support. Lastly, the prevalence of misunderstanding about the technology suggests that public education campaigns are needed before states deploy contact tracing apps. (Note: This paper is based on a new survey that we conducted in late June 2020. We identified a software issue that affected the results of our previous survey and fixed this problem in our new survey.)

Date: 2020-05-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:9wz3y

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9wz3y

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