A growing number of contact tracing apps are being developed to complement
manual contact tracing. A key question is whether users will be willing to
adopt these contact tracing apps. In this work, we survey over 4,500 Americans
to evaluate (1) the effect of both accuracy and privacy concerns on reported
willingness to install COVID19 contact tracing apps and (2) how different
groups of users weight accuracy vs. privacy. Drawing on our findings from these
first two research questions, we (3) quantitatively model how the amount of
public health benefit (reduction in infection rate), amount of individual
benefit (true-positive detection of exposures to COVID), and degree of privacy
risk in a hypothetical contact tracing app may influence American’s willingness
to install. Our work takes a descriptive ethics approach toward offering
implications for the development of policy and app designs related to COVID19.
Source: arxiv.org