As a social scientist who studies digital media uses, it seemed like I couldn’t sit back and watch the pandemic unfold without throwing myself into a related research project. I held off for the first week of our lockdown in Switzerland, but after several conversations with members of my research group about whether they were interested (I made clear it was completely optional not knowing how everyone would cope with the situation), we decided to take the plunge. Now, 5.5 weeks later, we have survey data from three countries (USA [n=1,374; Apr 4-8], Italy [n=982; Apr 17-18], Switzerland [n=1,350; fielded in three languages; Apr 17-24],) and have started putting some of our results out there with lots of publications in the works.
We explore numerous relevant domains from how people are feeling during the pandemic (about their home situation, their worries) to how much they understand the health aspects of the virus, where they are getting information about Covid, how they are using social media related to it, whether their work situation has changed, their confidence in various players handling the situation, and more.
Today, I share with you a piece that Elissa Redmiles and I co-authored in Scientific American about whether Americans would be willing to install a Covid-tracking app and how this may vary by who is distributing the app. Elissa is a top-notch expert in privacy and security issues, and we are now working on additional surveys that dig deeper into the question of app take-up (she’s started posting some of those results on her Twitter feed).
We find that two-thirds of Americans would be willing to install “a tracking app that could help slow the spread of the Coronavirus in your community and reduce the lockdown period [..] knowing that it would collect your location data and information about your health status.” But who is distributing the app matters. (See more in the piece.)
Compared to the 66% of Americans who are willing to install such an app, the figure is 72% among the Swiss, and 78% among Italians. There are significant differences in willingness if “the federal government” distributes the app (US: 20%, CH: 54%, IT: 53%). More on the Swiss case in a forthcoming oped with which I’ll update this post when it’s out. [UPDATE (posted May 2, 2020): The Swiss piece is out in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung here. (Click here to see it in its newspaper form.)]
My team is now working on another US survey to field next week (in addition to surveys with Elissa I mention above). It’s been fascinating doing research on the pandemic, but also exhausting. Nonetheless, we made the right decision by taking the plunge. Researching this situation makes me feel like I’m contributing in the way I can: exploring the role of digital media in how people are coping with this insane situation.
A big shout-out to my employer, the University of Zurich, for supporting this work!
{ 31 comments }
Abbott Katz 05.01.20 at 3:11 pm
You may want to see my downloadable spreadsheet on corona data at the above site.
Doug K 05.01.20 at 5:05 pm
thank you Eszter..
I wonder if that US government mistrust is at all affected by the Trump administration ?
It’s a given there will be much higher levels of mistrust in the US due to decades of Republican propagandizing and operations, but to get to 80% mistrust must take a large number of non-Republicans.
NomadUK 05.01.20 at 6:10 pm
Or it might just have something to do with little things like Vietnam, COINTELPRO, Tuskegee, MLK, Kent State, ‘missile gaps’, overthrowing governments, lies about WMD in Iraq, faked gas attacks in Syria, Ed Snowden blowing the lid on the NSA, intel heads lying to Congress, death by drone, and one or two other issues. Who can say? But, yeah, probably it’s all about Trump.
faustusnotes 05.02.20 at 1:56 am
Good work Eszter! And sad to see so many Americans again embracing stupid conspiratorial ideation in opposition to their own interests. This fear of technological ways of doing things we have always done is a really weird and stupid problem in modern society. Contact tracing will happen regardless of whether you have the app, it’ll just be more effective if you do. And what is the government going to do with this information if not use it for contact tracing? Make a map of who your friends are? I don’t understand why people think they’re so special that the government cares about them at all, it’s weird.
I’ve said this many times on here before but if your concern is that the government will misuse a useful technology, don’t stop using the technology – change your government. For example, I think the government should be able to unlock your phone. If you’re a child abuser I want the police to be able to access your phone. It’s ridiculous that they are allowed to smash down your door and take photos of child abuse from your bookshelf, but they aren’t allowed to access your phone. Yet nobody objects to the police being able to smash down your door. It’s a foolish fetishization of technology over good governance. I appreciate this is difficult for Americans because their governance structures are so poor but when you ban the tech rather than improving its governance, all you tell your leaders is that you’ve given up on controlling them. Not a good message!
At a time like this we need every technological tool in our arsenal. These surveillance apps are an excellent tool for improving contact tracing and really crushing this disease. Imagine if we added to them temperature data from fitbits, so we could track fever and warn the government of potential cases as they happen. But instead, we will be forced to use 100 year old thermometer technology that most people don’t even possess, because people are paranoid that for some reason the government cares who their friends are.
Anyway I hope your research will help people to develop a method for robust contact tracing that can assuage users’ fears and ensure we can put the tech to work.
John Quiggin 05.02.20 at 5:15 am
The Australian government has actually launched such an app, saying that the relaxation of controls is partially dependent on 10 million people (40 per cent of the population) downloading it. Latest number is 3.5 million, including me.
After a series of disasters in efforts of this kind, they seem to have taken privacy very seriously this time, with an absolute assurance that police and other agencies will have no access. The biggest hitch of this kind has been their reliance on a US supplier (Amazon) which means we need to get an assurance from the US government that they won’t try to extract the data. But, as the leader of our trade union movement said, most people who are likely to worry assume phones are tapped anyway.
Matt 05.02.20 at 6:51 am
I’ll likely download the app John Q mentions soon, though my hesitation at first was for worries about how information would be used. In Victoria, over-zealous police were giving out many $1650 fines for people supposedly violating lock-down rules a few weeks ago. Many of these were over-turned, and the dangers of allowing police to have the discretion of deciding when people violate vaguely written regulations was made obvious once again. I certainly would want to make sure that the information wasn’t used to see if I had been going “too far” (by whose definition?) from my home, and then to fine me. It seems like it won’t be, so I’m less hesitant to download.
faustusnotes – in the US, the police can get many things off of a person’s phone in the same way they can get the legal right to break down a door -by getting a warrant. In the cases where there is dispute, it turns on whether being required to provide certain sorts of information counts as violating a right against self-incrimination or not. One can dispute what should count as a violation of that right, and how strong the right should be, but if you accept that there’s such a right, then at least some of the issues are not obvious. Of course, not every society accepts that this is an important right – they are less protective of these rights – but again, it’s hardly obvious that societies that don’t well protect such a right are correct.
bad Jim 05.02.20 at 7:20 am
Bruce Schneier, among others, takes a dim view of such efforts.
“Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently alerts you of a contact. What should you do? It’s not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can’t confirm the app’s diagnosis. So the alert is useless.
“Similarly, assume you take the app out grocery shopping and it doesn’t alert you of any contact. Are you in the clear? No, you’re not. You actually have no idea if you’ve been infected.”
Such an app could be very useful in certain circumstances. Sadly, few of us find ourselves in such.
MisterMr 05.02.20 at 8:27 am
A tangential question: who is the “Federal government” in the case of Italy?
Does this refer to the national government or to the EU?
Is there a difference between “federal government” and the NHS?
(I’m curious because I’m Italian).
vagans 05.02.20 at 2:37 pm
faustusnotes: are you familiar with the concept of a retroscope? The intelligence agencies offer to be able to assemble a dossier, a list of contacts, and some black propaganda for any person of interest as soon as they become of interest: running for office, raising an uncomfortable issue to public attention, etc. The beautiful aspect of it is that almost everyone did something at some point in their life which can be used to smear them today, so if you have a complete record of all their communications and contacts, you just have to dig deep enough. Or how the Dutch had just completed a new high-tech census on punch cards in 1940 and suddenly having a searchable list of where every Jew in the Netherlands lived was a very bad idea?
Cranky Observer 05.02.20 at 3:01 pm
I’m sure faustusnotes is aware of the Five Eyes system, under which the US spies on the citizens of Canada and the UK, Australia spies on the citizens of the US and New Zealand, Canada spies on New Zealand and Australia, etc. The results of this spying are put in a central store that the members can tap thus neatly evading all legal or constitutional prohibitions on surveiling without due process. I hate to sound like a right-winger here because I am in international terms more on the collectivist end of social democracy, but when you create large institutions and give them authority the ordinary human beings who run those organizations do start to use the concomitant power to preserve their station. And the resulting emergent system doesn’t necessarily behave the way the original idealist theory predicted.
Eszter Hargittai 05.02.20 at 3:10 pm
There is no doubt that technology like this could be misused. There is a lot of commentary out there about this and legitimate concern. But we also have a very serious global health crisis on our hands. Elissa and I address this point with the following as we consider the implications of our findings:
People are rightly concerned about privacy risks from apps that track their activities given that such exposure can result in significant risks. Ensuring that multiple different apps are available will allow consumers the autonomy to select an app that collects only data they are comfortable sharing.
What findings? If you didn’t read the piece, you should, because I didn’t highlight everything here. I’m referring to people varying considerably in what organization they would trust as the distributor for willingness to install (see our graphic for quick info).
MisterMr, re Italy question, here is the exact wording:
Eszter Hargittai 05.02.20 at 3:16 pm
For anyone following along who speaks German or would like to see the Swiss piece in its natural habitat, click here.
MisterMr 05.02.20 at 4:05 pm
Thanks for the answer, I believe that the Italian item refers to the national Italian government, where other government agency (such as the health ministry) are listed separately.
hix 05.02.20 at 7:42 pm
The German app, if it comes some day is uterly paranoid about privacy, far too paranoid, which is probably why it´s still in the makeing. Really, it´s uterly sad how people are scared about the government getting some data, that is your own government. The NSA has whatever it wants on me from Google, Facebook etc.anyway. But the crucial point is – those companies have so much more much better data which they seem to use however they want and that is somehow less scary than the government having some very limited data with strict use guidelines for an obvious usefull purpose. This isn´t the NSAs ridiculous let´s grap all data there is on the internet we might find some terrorist nonsense that costs a ton of money, invades our privacy and doesn´t do any good at all.
Eszter Hargittai 05.02.20 at 8:40 pm
MisterMr, indeed, that’s the same in all language and country versions on purpose, It turns out that people perceive the national healthy agency (like CDC or BAG in CH) differently.
nastywoman 05.02.20 at 9:03 pm
and as we can’t visit our friends in Zürich –
(even if we are just 76 Kilometer away) –
and as we also researching the pandemic –
but perhaps in a different way as you guys –
we just sending this:
https://youtu.be/BK1c2kCHrME
J-D 05.03.20 at 4:39 am
So, does this information justify the conclusion that nobody should ever complete a census return, or should only complete it with false information?
Life is risk. Every choice you ever make comes with risks attached to every option. When you get out of bed, you’re taking a risk, but there are also risks associated with the alternative course of not getting out of bed. It’s sense to try to manage your risks, but it’s not sense to try to eliminate all risk, because it can’t be done.
More specifically, every time you disclose any information about yourself to anybody, you are taking a risk, but there are also risks associated with the alternative course of not disclosing any information about yourself to anybody.
Picking up on your specific example, I suppose it is theoretically possible that somebody could find a way of combining information from the Australian government’s COVIDSafe app with information from other sources which could be used to identify some Jews, and then proceeding to identify additional people with a record of frequently being in the company of Jews. If the promises the Australian government has made are kept, this won’t be possible, but I understand that promises like that, although kept sometimes, perhaps even often, are not kept always. So there is some level of risk that somebody (possibly some hypothetical future Australian government, possibly somebody else) will be assisted in a project of identifying (for malign purposes) Jews, or people they would consider to be Jew-lovers, by data harvested (in contravention of the promised safeguards) from the COVIDSafe app. When I considered signing up for the COVIDSafe app, I had no reason to think about that risk in particular, but I thought about the general category of risks of which it’s one example, and I decided that the risks were tiny and massively outweighed by the benefits of the app. I can understand that there would be some people with specific reasons to be concerned about protection of their personal information for whom the calculation might reasonably be different, but surely the number of such people, in this particular instance, is tiny?
faustusnotes 05.03.20 at 8:36 am
bad jim, all contact tracing is a waste of time without testing. The entire point of contact tracing is to test people who might be at risk so they can receive treatment and/or change social behavior before they infect others. You don’t contact trace a person with HIV or an STI and then not give them a test! This is an example of how the technology is blinding people to a more basic principle.
vagans, I’ve never heard of a retroscope and I’m not convinced it is what you say it is, but I understand the concept of intelligence agencies compiling a dossier. Do you think that this wasn’t done before smart phones existed? Furthermore, do you think intelligence agencies shouldn’t compile dossiers on people like Timothy McVeigh? Note they could compile the dossier without having access to McVeigh’s phone – they could just physically watch him, speak to his friends and associates, etc. The only difference with the phone is that it makes the compilation easier, and potentially better. Similarly with the idea of the Dutch compiling a complete register of Jewish people from punch cards. I thought it was well known that churches made their parish records available to Nazis for precisely the purpose you allude to. Sure, a database is more searchable but that doesn’t make it different or wronger. The problem in 1940s Holland was not the punch cards, it was the Nazis. All of these cases are just allowing you to be blinded by the tech.
I remember when DNA evidence first started being used and the usual suspects complained that it was a massive intrusion of privacy. Now it’s the core tool used by the Innocence Project to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted using much less reliable techniques. A lot of the cases the Innocence Project works on wouldn’t exist if the police were better managed and governed, and prosecutors were not a law unto themselves. Instead of obsessing over the tech, it’s much better to improve the governance.
If this app is not used because of fears about privacy and misuse, that is a very good example of the importance of social trust for maintaining a cohesive society. And you can bet that the Alex Jones’s and Chapo Trap Houses of America are monetizing those fears, convincing people not to trust a simple app so they can make a bit more money from lies and fake scandals. It’s very dangerous, and people need to be more aware of how misleading this distrust and obsession with dangerous new tech can be.
vagans 05.03.20 at 1:38 pm
faustusnotes: here is how it works. Until the 1990s, spies only had access to your life starting from the day when you became a person of interest. It was too expensive to track everyone, even in the DDR. But now, the goal is that if someone becomes a person of interest, they can deliver a complete history of their life, their movements, their communications, and something embarrasing they said or did on demand. And nobody can know what they do today but will look dangerous in 20 years, in the way they can quietly drop out of that organization or stop attending meetings of that party as they see the winds changing.
In the United States, this leads to something called parallel construction: testifying in court that you learned fact A from source X, when really you learned it from source Y which you do not want to reveal, perhaps because it is illegal. It also leads to LOVEINT: people use intelligence tools to track partners they want to abuse.
I think how you feel about this will depend on whether you grew up expecting the police were there to make problems go away, or whether you grew up expecting them to hurt and harrass you and your friends and family. And it will depend on whether you are used to the legal definition of “the public interest” including your own interest, or excluding it. In my view, and the views of millions of other privacy advocates organized around the world, some powers are too dangers to allow anyone. The surveillance-industrial complex needs to be broken up not nationalized.
vagans 05.03.20 at 1:45 pm
faustusnotes: if you have not read it, please read “IBM and the Holocaust” about how the murder of so many Jews, Roma, disabled people, etc. was only possible with the help of mechanical computers. If the Nazis had had to do everything by hand, it would have been impossible to compile such effective lists, organize all those cattle cars, and so on in the time available, they could have managed a good old-fashioned progrom but not the holocaust. If you do not know it, I beg you, read it.
notGoodenough 05.03.20 at 5:03 pm
[Apologies to the OP if this is continuing a derailment.]
David Hume taught us that confidence should be proportional to the evidence. The more evidence in favour of sharing information, the more in favour of doing so I am. I don’t think that that is an exceptionally unreasonable approach to take, though I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
To elabourate, if someone (be they government, company, or private individual) wants access to information, I would try to assess the situation based on at least 1) the justification for needing the information, 2) how critical the information is to me, and 3) what safeguards are in place to prevent misuse or accidental release. The less evidence there is that those points are satisfied, the less confidence I would have in handing the information over.
For example, I am happy to participate in the national survey because 1) the information helps inform decisions regarding balancing local services 2) the information requested is not particularly critical nor embarrassing, and 3) there are safeguard in place (including anonymising the data before use). If, however, a government wanted access to literally everything I’ve ever said, done, or thought, with no oversight or safeguards, and the justification was “how dare you question us!â€, I would be far less convinced.
Genies are notoriously hard to put back in the bottle. This doesn’t mean we have to oppose any information being in the hands of our governments – we should just make sure that there is good reason to do so first. After all, governments and the people who comprise them are not infallible – it has been known for data to be accidently left in the backs of taxis before now. And, of course, people do make mistakes, sometime act spitefully, and can act harmfully (even sometimes while being convinced of the righteousness of their actions).
In the case of the app mentioned here, I would (were it offered to me, and were I in possession of suitable equipment) be fairly happy with using it (after all, the data is not particularly harmful to me, and presumably once the pandemic is over it is not impossible for me to opt out again).
However, I’m afraid that that doesn’t mean I would be comfortable if, for example, my government were to demand the right to access anyone’s emails and private information at any time, with no justification or oversight. Perhaps that makes me unreasonable, as some commentators here seem to be suggesting, but I would think if it were then the case should be made – without just asserting that I am either paranoid, narcissistic, or refusing to hand over any information at all.
After all, let us not forget the FBI monitored Martin Luther King, and his sexual indiscretions were used in an attempt to undermine the equal rights movement. That isn’t exactly the ravings of lunatics – governments have, at various times, brought considerable power against those it deems a threat. And, while I am unlikely to ever become of any note (certainly not worth that effort),
Moreover, with great power, should come great accountability. I don’t think it is beyond the pale to suggest that perhaps there should be some oversight to prevent that sort of misuse of power against people who are worthy of notice. That doesn’t mean I think that, for example, the UK government is full of evil people who wish to crush all before them – merely that I think they shouldn’t be in a position to do so should the temptation ever arise (particularly as governments change, and who is in power one moment may very well be different the next).
Knowledge is, after all, power. In a general sense, if someone is demanding more power over you, perhaps it is worth at least considering why before handing it over – particularly as you won’t get a chance to take it back later.
hix 05.03.20 at 6:25 pm
Can we all agree at least that a blue tooth tracker of your 2m distance contacts while you had your phone on – and no ones talking about forcing anyone to turn one´s phone on is absolutly reasonable even if the data is saved on a central server? That was the ridiculous German dispute. Now the contacts will not even be on a central server and only be sent there after you gave your ok. As far as i am concerend a central server controled by the government instead of google facebook etc. would have been a huge progress for data security, since that could have been extend to removing all tracking data from the hands of big foreign companies which would only be allowed to access those on a case by case basis where e.g. navigation requires it.
Tm 05.03.20 at 7:22 pm
If the German authorities decided to “err†on the side of privacy and data protection, they took exactly the correct approach, and the only viable and responsible and justifiable one.
Cranky Observer 05.03.20 at 10:04 pm
Can we all agree that this would be the perfect target for Hacking Team or NSO Group to crack into and transfer to Cambridge Analytica to calculate house-by-house targeting profiles for the Republican Party to use in the next (and therefore possibly last) US national election?
I realize I have been involved in, and kept abreast of, connected systems security a lot longer than most, and am therefore more than a bit paranoid, but it is as if even those events that have been revealed about the 2016 US election (and related activities such as Black Cube issuing assassination orders for people legally resident on US soil; the whole bone saw episode) have just vanished from memory. One doesn’t have to be anyone important to be part of a sweep or targeting operation in the 20s.
J-D 05.03.20 at 10:27 pm
So, if they can already do all that, how does downloading the COVIDSafe app make things worse?
That seems reasonable enough, but it doesn’t follow that what’s true of ‘some powers’ must also be true of ‘all powers’, and so it doesn’t automatically follow that it’s true of the specific powers under discussion.
I can imagine how this would justify greater caution on the part of people with abusive partners or former partners who might access intelligence tools, but I can’t figure how it’s relevant to people like me who are not in that category.
So what conclusion do you reach from that starting point? Not that all computer technology should be destroyed, disposed of, or avoided, obviously! It was used to perpetrate atrocities, and here you are still using it: so what’s your point?
faustusnotes 05.04.20 at 2:19 am
vagans, I haven’t read that and it looks interesting but the conclusions you draw from it are preposterous. First of all it’s doubtful that IBM was active in the general government, occupied Russia, or Ukraine. The millions killed there were managed without databases. Secondly, the problem with the sentence “the nazis used computer databases to help them murder millions of Jews” is in the second part, not the first. Is your suggestion taht we don’t keep registers of our citizens, don’t use computer databases to manage society, in case the nazis rock up? How about instead we smash nazis? If we follow your logic to its conclusion should we also not use trains, aircraft, boats, or any of the other myriad tools that have been used throughout history to do bad things?
You also suggest that people who prefer governance solutions to technological barriers didn’t grow up expecting the police to cause problems. This isn’t true of me. I grew up in Australia in the 1980s, in working class communities, where the police were a huge problem for working-class men and especially for non-white working class men. When I moved to Sydney to work in 1995 there were still underage boys doing sex work at a notorious stretch of the inner city called “the wall”, and that trade was aided, abetted and sometimes participated in by local police, who also extorted local sex workers and facilitated drug trade. We didn’t stop this by attacking the tech they used, because they didn’t use any. Instead we stopped it by reforming the police and making new laws to eliminate corruption. I had comrades who were assault and framed by the police during that time. That kind of bullshit stopped because we used political power to stop it.
The basic tool of fascism is the jackbooted thug and the destruction of political systems. You won’t stop it by eliminating punch cards or stopping the police from accessing your phones. You can’t stop a pandemic by refusing to provide your information to the state, because the state needs your information to stop the pandemic. The only question is whether the information you provide will be easy for them to use or difficult, complete or incomplete. This virus is very, very bad and we need a lot of help to get rid of it. Your paranoia and the excessive conspiracy theories of Americans, plus their failure to understand governance, is going to mean you can’t stamp it out. It really is that simple.
J-D 05.04.20 at 4:26 am
I don’t think we can. Why would we all agree with that?
hix 05.05.20 at 4:05 pm
By the way: Apple has essentially forced the governments to use a decentral app by denying any proper access to iphones for a central server solution. I´m frankly shocked that European governments did just accept that instead of suggesting Apple they can sell their overpriced crap elswhere but not in the EU anymore now. This is not about protecting privacy, it´s about protecting who is in control: Big US corporations definitly ok, NSA we would rather not share but if you insist ok, European government no way.
hix 05.05.20 at 4:12 pm
Wow, it is even worse than i thought first: Apperently apple and google both require much higher data privacy standards from government run corona tracing apps than from any random crappy comercial program. What a shame. It is completlye ok to invade my privacy for add targeting or any other commercial purpose, but the second its about saving thousands of lifes, US corporations start to become very concerened about my data privacy. We really need an EU agency that replaces all those commercial US monopolies yesterday.
Cranky Observer 05.05.20 at 6:54 pm
hix nearly illustrates the difficulty Apple faces in providing a reasonably secure system (not just one product) without the company officers being tossed into Gitmo when in two successive comments he criticizes Apple for being insecure, too secure, invasive of privacy, under government thumb, dictatorial, overpriced, and junk – all at the same time.
hix 05.05.20 at 9:33 pm
Not my fault Apple managed to do all of it at the same time. There is a clear normative hierarchy and Apple manages to get its prirorities exactly backwards. The fact that Cranky doesn´t get it just shows how much US norms have started to diverge from the European consensus – which shows how dangerous it is to keep accepting that a bunch of private for profit US monopoly are in charge of those things.
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