Beyond the Pandemic and Privacy Concerns: Perceived Benefit and Expected Use of Pandemic-Tracking Apps in India

Abstract

Pandemic-tracking apps could be a viable pandemic-mitigation technique, although their efficacy has been weakened by limited adoption in many places. Therefore, it is important to investigate how the perceptions of such apps are formed in different regions, which may help explain the differences in adoption. We replicated prior work on the adoption of pandemic-tracking apps in the United States with participants from India (n = 236). We identified that the perceptions of pandemic-tracking apps are connected to social orientation, familiarity with health-related technology, and demographics. We found that the perceptions and expected use were uncorrelated with privacy concerns, suggesting that privacy may not necessarily be the most suitable lens for studying the adoption of pandemic-tracking apps in India. Based on the findings, we make several recommendations for future pandemic-preparedness campaigns and identify the need to continue the trend toward contextualizing privacy-centered research with privacy-adjacent individual factors across multiple regions.