Abstract
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital contact tracing has been developed and promoted in many countries as a valuable tool to help the fight against the virus, allowing health authorities to react quickly and limit contagion. Very often, however, these tracing apps have faced public resistance, making their use relatively sparse and ineffective. Our study relies on an interdisciplinary approach that brings together criminological and computational expertise to consider the key social dynamics underlying people’s resistance to using the NHS contact-tracing app in England and Wales. The present study analyses a large Twitter dataset to investigate interactions between relevant user accounts and identify the main narrative frames (lack of trust and negative liberties) and mechanisms (polluted information, conspiratorial thinking and reactance) to explain resistance towards use of the NHS contact-tracing app. Our study builds on concepts of User eXperience (UX) and algorithm aversion and demonstrates the relevance of these elements to the key criminological problem of resistance to official technologies.
Highlights
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, contact-tracing apps have been developed and released in several countries, including the UK, as a measure to combat the spread of COVID-19, speeding up the tracing of the contacts of individuals found to be infected.[1]
At the core of this approach is the notion that, the novel coronavirus spreads too rapidly to be contained by manual contact tracing, it can be controlled and contained through the use of automatised contact tracing via apps, if used by a sufficient number of people.[2]
We focus on the concepts of User eXperience (UX) and algorithm aversion, both of which draw attention to the real-world contexts in which technology is deployed, to enhance criminological understandings of the factors underpinning the resistance to official technologies, such as digital-tracing apps and identity-remedial strategies
Summary
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, contact-tracing apps have been developed and released in several countries, including the UK, as a measure to combat the spread of COVID-19, speeding up the tracing of the contacts of individuals found to be infected.[1] At the core of this approach is the notion that, the novel coronavirus spreads too rapidly to be contained by manual contact tracing, it can be controlled and contained through the use of automatised contact tracing via apps, if used by a sufficient number of people.[2] Such apps are generally based on practical hardware technologies (e.g., Bluetooth low energy and possibly GPS data), meaning they can be used by virtually anyone with a smartphone It is arguably unsurprising that these apps— in privacyconscious countries—have faced strong public resistance, and their resulting use has made them relatively ineffective
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