Abstract
To help prevent the spread of COVID-19, countries around the world have implemented a range of measures and virus containment strategies, including digital contact-tracing (DCT) in the form of smartphone apps. While early studies showed a high level of acceptability of such technologies, the adoption rates varied greatly between countries after contact-tracing apps became available to download. This cross-national user survey ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}=871$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) aims to explore public attitudes and factors that affect user acceptability and adoption of contact-tracing apps in the USA, UK, and the Republic of Ireland, which employ similar underlying technology, but have uneven adoption rates. The results indicate interactions between installation decisions and public trust in actors and institutions communicating COVID-related information, and releasing such technologies. Beyond the immediate case of contact tracing, our findings hold implications for the deployment and communicative framing of technology for public health and the public good, and inform the design of crisis response public health information systems.
Highlights
The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome (COVID-19), infecting millions of people globally
We aim to study whether public views of personal and governmental efficacy in containing the virus affect the acceptability of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps
RQ5: we investigate whether trust in authority groups and actors, such as public health authorities or scientists, correlates with compliance with the guidelines provided by DCT application alert features
Summary
The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome (COVID-19), infecting millions of people globally. Lockdowns entail high socioeconomic costs [3], [4], and with limited healthcare resources and uncertainty caused by new strains of COVID-19, the pandemic has spurred the deployment of innovative information systems (IS) to help prevent further spread of the disease. One such IS solution is digital contact tracing (DCT), which has been introduced in many countries to assist and supplement manual contact-tracing. In the US, the uptake varied from state to state with around 8.1 million installations in total by December 2020 [30], about 2.4% of the total US population
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