Drivers of downloading and reasons for not downloading COVID-19 contact tracing and exposure notification apps: A national cross-sectional survey

Abstract

Background Bluetooth-enabled smartphone apps have been developed and implemented in different sites globally to help overcome capacity limitations of traditional interview-based COVID-19 contact tracing. Two apps are currently available in Canada: ABTraceTogether exclusively in Alberta and COVID Alert in nine other provinces and territories. This study aims to examine factors associated with downloading of these apps to inform targeted promotion and marketing to increase app uptake. Methods We performed a cross-sectional survey with adult participants (≥18 years old) from an online national panel. Participants were asked if they had downloaded an app and, if applicable, reasons for not downloading. Logistic regression was used to identify sociodemographic factors and trusted information sources associated with downloading and reasons for not downloading. Results Of the included 4,503 respondents (36% response rate), 1,394 (31%) had downloaded an app. Demographic and socioeconomic factors positively associated with app download were: 1) being female, 2) higher household income, 3) higher education level attained, and 4) more liberal political views. The odds of downloading an app were higher for participants who trusted health-related information sources, and lower for those who trusted internet searches, family and friend, or Facebook. The most cited reasons for not downloading were related to data security concerns and perceived lack of benefit from the apps. Interpretation These findings identify sociodemographic segments with the lowest app uptake, reasons for not downloading and trusted information sources to inform targeted promotion and marketing strategies to improve uptake of apps to facilitate contact tracing.

Willingness to pay premium prices for green buildings: evidence from an emerging economy

“…Stern (2000) pointed out that AC is associated with people's consciousness about harmful environmental consequences when they act in a way that is not aligned with being environmentally friendly. Gao et al (2022) investigated the positive and significant relationship between awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility in the context of digital contract tracing apps. Walker et al (2021) discussed the importance of awareness of consequences and willingness to pay premiums in the context of sustainable food packaging.…”

Protect Your Score: Contact-Tracing with Differential Privacy Guarantees

“…Most studies, however, focused on the effectiveness of the pandemic mitigation, while we argue that privacy concerns hold the deployment back (Raskar et al 2020;Alsdurf et al 2020). Population surveys during and after the pandemic show that mistrust and 'worries about privacy' are among the top three reasons not to use a contact tracing app (Jones, Thompson et al 2021;Gao et al 2022;Walrave, Waeterloos, and Ponnet 2022).…”

“…Previous work proposed Gibbs sampling to estimate the COVIDSCORE in decentralized contact tracing (Herbrich, Rastogi, and Vollgraf 2020). For achieving DP, we use an existing method with ε-DP for a sample from a probability distribution with clipped likelihoods (Wang, Fienberg, and Smola 2015;Foulds et al 2016). Inference for the model specified in Equation 2 makes estimates with Monte Carlo samples from a Gibbs chain.…”

“…For example, DP for MCMC has been studied (Yıldırım and Ermis ¸2019;Heikkilä et al 2019). We implement and compare to a method (Wang, Fienberg, and Smola 2015;Foulds et al 2016) that specifically tailors to Gibbs sampling (Herbrich, Rastogi, and Vollgraf 2020). Zhang et al (2017) analyzes the computation of marginals in a message-passing approach for inference.…”

The effectiveness of COVID-19 surveillance applications in Uganda:

“…The key drivers of adopting these COVID-19 surveillance applications generally relate with sociodemographic segments such as having trust in the government information sources, medical interventions, targeted promotion and marketing strategies for these applications (Gao et al, 2022). A related study was conducted by Priyansyah et al, (2023) in Indonesia to comprehensively understand the public's intention to use PeduliLindung, a contact tracing application for COVID-19.…”