User Concerns & Tradeoffs in Technology-facilitated COVID-19 Response
Elissa M. Redmiles · Digital Government Research and Practice · 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in late 2019 and early 2020. As the pandemic spread, technologists joined forces with public health officials to develop apps to support COVID-19 response. Yet, for these technological solutions to benefit public health, users must be willing to adopt these apps. This article details a framework of inputs to a user’s decision to adopt a COVID-19 contact-tracing app or other COVID-19 technology along four major axes: technology benefits, solution accuracy, privacy considerations, and mobile-related costs. This framework is empirically validated via both the literature and a demographically-representative survey of 1,000 Americans.