How mass surveillance can crowd out installations of COVID-19 contact tracing apps

TL;DR

The paper investigates whether involuntary mass-surveillance deployments crowd out voluntary COVID-19 contact-tracing adoption. Using Israel's concurrent HaMagen app and GSS mass-surveillance as a natural experiment, it analyzes a representative online survey (n=519) with logistic regression to predict installation and uninstallation. Results show mass-surveillance attitudes negatively predict installation (e.g., OR: $0.547$, $95\%$ CI $[0.372,0.803]$) and strongly predict uninstallation (OR: $8.57$, $95\%$ CI $[2.837,25.908]$), even when controlling for app attitudes and privacy concerns; battery concerns also drive uninstallation. The findings highlight crowding-out mechanisms, call for privacy-preserving designs and transparent governance, and have broad policy implications for dual-track data collection systems during public health crises.

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have developed and deployed contact tracing technologies to curb the spread of the disease by locating and isolating people who have been in contact with coronavirus carriers. Subsequently, understanding why people install and use contact tracing apps is becoming central to their effectiveness and impact. This paper analyzes situations where centralized mass surveillance technologies are deployed simultaneously with a voluntary contact tracing mobile app. We use this parallel deployment as a natural experiment that tests how attitudes toward mass deployments affect people's installation of the contact tracing app. Based on a representative survey of Israelis (n=519), our findings show that positive attitudes toward mass surveillance were related to a reduced likelihood of installing contact tracing apps and an increased likelihood of uninstalling them. These results also hold when controlling for privacy concerns about the contact tracing app, attitudes toward the app, trust in authorities, and demographic properties. Similar reasoning may also be relevant for crowding out voluntary participation in data collection systems.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Relationship between installation of the app and amount of attitudes toward app (a), attitudes toward mass surveillance (b), and privacy concerns (c). Marginal probabilities are shown with 95% CI.
• Figure 2: Relationship between uninstalling the contact tracing app and attitudes toward the app (a), attitudes toward mass surveillance (b), and battery concerns (c). Marginal probabilities are shown with 95% CI.
• Figure 3: A timeline of the implementation of Contact Tracing Technologies in Israel
• Figure 4: Hamagen Architecture
• Figure 5: The Tool Architecture