Stop the Spread: A Contextual Integrity Perspective on the Appropriateness of COVID-19 Vaccination Certificates

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how privacy concerns, analyzed through the Contextual Integrity framework, influence public acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination certificates across various scenarios in the US.

Contribution

It applies the Contextual Integrity privacy framework to empirically assess public attitudes towards vaccination certificates in different contexts using vignette methodology.

Findings

Privacy expectations vary across contexts.

Acceptance of vaccination certificates depends on information flow parameters.

Guidelines for deploying vaccination certificates responsibly.

Abstract

We present an empirical study exploring how privacy influences the acceptance of vaccination certificate (VC) deployments across different realistic usage scenarios. The study employed the privacy framework of Contextual Integrity, which has been shown to be particularly effective in capturing people's privacy expectations across different contexts. We use a vignette methodology, where we selectively manipulate salient contextual parameters to learn whether and how they affect people's attitudes towards VCs. We surveyed 890 participants from a demographically-stratified sample of the US population to gauge the acceptance and overall attitudes towards possible VC deployments to enforce vaccination mandates and the different information flows VCs might entail. Analysis of results collected as part of this study is used to derive general normative observations about different possible VC practices and to provide guidance for the possible deployments of VCs in different contexts.