How mass surveillance can crowd out installations of COVID-19 contact tracing apps

TL;DR

This study investigates how the deployment of centralized mass surveillance during COVID-19 negatively impacted the adoption and retention of voluntary contact tracing apps, highlighting privacy concerns and attitudes toward surveillance.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that positive attitudes toward mass surveillance reduce contact tracing app adoption, using a natural experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings

Positive attitudes toward mass surveillance decrease app installation.

Mass surveillance deployment increases app uninstallation.

Attitudes toward surveillance influence voluntary data collection participation.

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have developed and deployed contact tracing technologies to curb the spread of the disease by locating and isolating people who have been in contact with coronavirus carriers. Subsequently, understanding why people install and use contact tracing apps is becoming central to their effectiveness and impact. This paper analyzes situations where centralized mass surveillance technologies are deployed simultaneously with a voluntary contact tracing mobile app. We use this parallel deployment as a natural experiment that tests how attitudes toward mass deployments affect people's installation of the contact tracing app. Based on a representative survey of Israelis (n=519), our findings show that positive attitudes toward mass surveillance were related to a reduced likelihood of installing contact tracing apps and an increased likelihood of uninstalling them. These results also hold when controlling for privacy concerns about the contact tracing app, attitudes toward the app, trust in authorities, and demographic properties. Similar reasoning may also be relevant for crowding out voluntary participation in data collection systems.