Us and Them (and It): Social Orientation, Privacy Concerns, and Expected Use of Pandemic-Tracking Apps in the United States

Title of the Paper

Us and Them (and It): Social Orientation, Privacy Concerns, and Americans' Expected Use of Pandemic Tracking Applications

Bibliographic Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Orientation, Privacy Issues, and Pandemic Tracking Technology
• Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, privacy, social orientation, IND-COL, social framing, social contract, contact tracing, surveillance, individualism, collectivism, smartphone apps, mobile applications, MUIPC

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues or Challenges:

  1. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, societal attitudes toward the deployment of technology for tracking and controlling the spread of the virus are contradictory. On one hand, there is a demand for controlling the spread of the virus; on the other, there is a necessity to respect individual rights, values, and freedoms.
  2. Solutions proposed by governments and technology sectors often face ethical dilemmas, privacy concerns, and complex issues regarding how to avoid further promoting a surveillance culture.
  3. Current research has yet to analyze how social orientation (e.g., individualism and collectivism) influences perceptions and expected use of pandemic tracking applications.

• Research Importance:
  Exploring the relationship between this technology and the social contract is of critical importance, as pandemic tracking technology's balance between public health needs and privacy rights may shape the societal structure in the post-pandemic era. Understanding the impact of social orientation on technology adoption can provide better guidance for designing such urgent technologies.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  1. Within the existing theoretical frameworks of user privacy norms and mobile health technologies, pandemic tracking technology is viewed as a novel mobile health scenario.
  2. The specific challenges faced by COVID-19 tracking technology require dedicated research, incorporating theories from psychology, usable privacy, and mobile health.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Methods or Solutions:
  The authors conducted online experiments and surveys, addressing the following four research questions (RQs):

  1. Does social orientation predict perceptions and expected use of pandemic tracking applications?
  2. Does the social framing of pandemic tracking applications influence perceptions and expected use?
  3. Does the utility framing of the application (e.g., describing usage outcomes) affect perceptions and expected use?
  4. Are mobile privacy concerns related to perceptions and expected use of pandemic tracking applications?

• Innovative Contributions:

  1. Introduced a new research dimension based on social orientation and framing perspectives.
  2. Revealed, for the first time, the relationship between social orientation and perceptions of technology use during the pandemic, as well as privacy concerns.
  3. Highlighted ethical and social contract issues brought by new technologies in the post-pandemic era.

• Implementation Steps and Techniques:

  1. Conducted experiments using the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform, recruiting 389 U.S. participants.
  2. Set up four research scenarios (individualism/collectivism framing × positive/negative utility framing) and collected participants' perceptions, expected behaviors, and privacy concerns regarding pandemic tracking applications through surveys.
  3. Used Ordinal Logistic Regression (OLR) to examine main effects and interaction effects in the data, further employing Spearman correlation coefficients to analyze the impact of privacy concerns.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:

  1. Main Effect of Social Orientation:
     • Participants with collectivist tendencies generally held more positive perceptions of pandemic tracking applications and exhibited a higher willingness to use them.
  2. Interaction Effect of Social Framing:
     • Contrary to expectations, individualist framing enhanced certain collectivists' perceptions of the application.
     • Individualists' perceptions and intentions to use the application were insensitive to framing settings.
  3. Impact of Utility Framing:
     • Whether the application was described as "beneficial" or "invasive" did not significantly affect user perceptions or expected use.
  4. Privacy Concerns:
     • Under short-term health threats, privacy concerns did not significantly negatively impact perceptions of the application's benefits.
     • Privacy concerns were significantly negatively correlated with long-term usage intentions post-pandemic, particularly regarding secondary data use and privacy infringements.

• Advantages Over Existing Solutions:

  1. The authors incorporated individual social orientation into the model, addressing a research gap.
  2. Provided insights for designing public health technologies, especially regarding sensitivity to social framing in different cultural contexts.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  1. Collectivists were more likely to accept public health technologies under health threats, while individualists showed lower acceptance and greater privacy concerns.
  2. Younger groups were more inclined to continue using the application post-pandemic, but privacy concerns could pose significant barriers to future use.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  1. This study was limited to the U.S. context, and its applicability to other sociocultural environments requires further validation.
  2. Future research should conduct longitudinal studies based on timelines to observe changes in social orientation and privacy attitudes during and after the pandemic.
  3. Explore more effective interaction designs and communication frameworks to accommodate the behavioral characteristics of individualists.

Conclusion

This paper conducted innovative research by integrating social orientation, privacy concerns, and technology acceptance frameworks, providing new perspectives for the design and deployment of pandemic tracking technologies. These findings lay a theoretical foundation for designing technological solutions that align with the post-pandemic social contract, while emphasizing the complex balance between long-term privacy protection and short-term health assistance.