afictitious Covid-19Watch app, featuring varying degrees of privacy and convenience, along with three benefit related communications in the app. The benefit communications in the apps were for the self (being informed about high-risk contacts); for society (contributing to broader tracing coverage and informing others of a risk of infection); and for a combination of both. With thefirst, people install the app for their own wants and needs, while the second prioritises others, a form of social altruism. While policymakers might prefer a combination to reach more people, that can dilute the message. It comes down to a contest between benefit to the self and benefit for the greater good. Privacy concerns arise over the storage and use of personal data, and are a common reason for people not installing an app, but contact tracing apps only work if they can access and process this sensitive information. How this is dealt with – using GPS or Bluetooth, with central or decentralised storage, with restricted or extended data use – shapes decisions on whether or not to install; thus we presented high and low privacy options. Around convenience, we presented apps that required little time and effort to install, run and update, and those needing extra user-input and which can lead to higher battery consumption. High conveniencemay seem the obvious choice, but building such an app entails a greater investment of time and money, and time is something in short supply for a pandemic like Covid-19. We found distinct groups among our participants, with differing preferences, information that is vital to policymakers needing to reach critical mass for their app distribution. Societal benefits are key for theCritics. They are less concernedwith how the app can benefit themselves, thanwith how it can have a positive effect on the population as awhole. Ahigh privacy design is alsoparamount. Among the Undecided, societal benefits are similarly important, with convenience of use having the strongest effect on installation intention. For Advocates, none of the three factorswe varied had a substantial effect on their intention to install. Theremay be other issues beyond the design of the app at play here, and specificationsmatter little to them. Precise targeting of all three groups is unfeasible, so policy-makers must determine, perhaps through surveys, which, if any, group the vast majority of the populationfit into, and design the app accordingly based on which aspects are important to that group. But if there is no majority, we suggest targeting the Undecided and the Advocates with high levels of privacy and convenience while speaking to altruistic rather than self-focused motivations. For example, the deployment of Singapore’s tracing app was accompanied by the message “Together we can make our world safer for everyone.” The problems with the design and early implementation of the UK tracing app and the low uptake of the app in France – where fewer than 70 people used it to report a positive Covid-19 test in itsfirst three weeks – demonstrate the difficulties governments have faced. But there have been more successful implementations – the German app was downloaded almost 10 million times in itsfirst week. Our research provides a glimpse into why all countries have faced difficulties in deploying these apps to reach a critical mass of the population. Only time will tell which have been successful. Monideepa Tarafdaris a Professor in the Department of Management Science, and Co-Director for the Centre for Technological Futures. The paperOne app to trace them all? Examining app specifications for mass acceptance of contacttracing appsis co-authored with Professor Simon Trang, Professor Manual Trenz, Professor Welf Weiger and Professor Christy Cheung, and is published in the European Journal of Information Systems . m.tarafdar@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOURDEGREES | 17
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