How good is good enough for COVID19 apps? The influence of benefits, accuracy, and privacy on willingness to adopt

TL;DR

This study assesses how accuracy, privacy, and perceived benefits influence Americans' willingness to adopt COVID-19 contact tracing apps, providing insights for policy and app design to enhance adoption rates.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive survey of over 4,500 Americans analyzing privacy and accuracy concerns, and models how benefits and privacy risks impact willingness to adopt COVID-19 contact tracing apps.

Findings

Privacy concerns significantly reduce willingness to adopt.

Higher perceived health benefits increase willingness.

Trade-offs between privacy and accuracy influence user decisions.

Abstract

A growing number of contact tracing apps are being developed to complement manual contact tracing. A key question is whether users will be willing to adopt these contact tracing apps. In this work, we survey over 4,500 Americans to evaluate (1) the effect of both accuracy and privacy concerns on reported willingness to install COVID19 contact tracing apps and (2) how different groups of users weight accuracy vs. privacy. Drawing on our findings from these first two research questions, we (3) quantitatively model how the amount of public health benefit (reduction in infection rate), amount of individual benefit (true-positive detection of exposures to COVID), and degree of privacy risk in a hypothetical contact tracing app may influence American's willingness to install. Our work takes a descriptive ethics approach toward offering implications for the development of policy and app designs related to COVID19.