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.
翻译:在COVID-19大流行期间,许多国家通过寻找和隔离与冠状病毒携带者接触的人,开发并使用了接触追踪技术,以遏制该疾病的传播。随后,了解人们为什么安装和使用接触追踪应用软件正成为其效力和影响的核心。本文件分析了集中大规模监视技术与自愿联系追踪移动应用同时部署的情况。我们把这一平行部署作为一种天然实验,测试对大规模部署的态度如何影响人们安装联系追踪应用软件。根据对以色列人进行的一项有代表性的调查(n=519),我们的调查结果显示,对大规模监视的积极态度与安装接触追踪应用软件的可能性降低和不安装这些应用程序的可能性增加有关。这些结果在控制关于接触追踪应用、对应用程序的态度、对当局的信任和人口特性的隐私关切时,也存在。类似的推论也可能与排挤自愿参与数据收集系统有关。