Numerous information-tracking solutions have been implemented worldwide to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. While prior work has heavily explored the factors affecting people’s willingness to adopt contact tracing solutions, numerous countries have implemented other information tracking solutions that use more and more sensitive data.
Recently I gave a keynote at Samsung Security Tech Forum, where I described a recent study conducted by my research group in collaboration with Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and Microsoft. Led by PhD candidate in my research group Yue Huang, the study builds on existing work focused on contact-tracing apps to explore adoption and design considerations for six representative information-tracking solutions for COVID-19,which differ in their goals and in the types of information they collect. To do so, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 44 participants to investigate the factors that influence their willingness to adopt these solutions. We find four main categories of factors linked to participants’ willingness to adopt such solutions: individual benefits of the solution, societal benefits of the solution, functionality concerns, and digital safety (e.g., security and privacy) concerns. Further, we enumerate the factors that inform participant’s evaluations of these categories. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for the future design of information-tracking solutions and discuss how different factors may balance against benefits in future crisis situations
To learn more, watch my keynote:
