Information Technology and the pandemic: a preliminary multinational analysis of the impact of mobile tracking technology on the COVID-19 contagion control

Abstract

This paper explores the benefits and drawbacks of government surveillance within a public health crisis, specifically the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020. We review the current state of COVID-19 infection tracking by public health authorities, and then we examine the effectiveness of voluntary and mandatory mobile contact-tracing apps by COVID-19-positive or suspected positive individuals in China, Germany, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. Through a Difference-InDifferences test, the apps were found to be highly significantly correlated with a reduction in the spread of COVID-19 in their countries. Robustness tests were run with four alternative models and the results are kept and presented within. In light of the success of these apps, ethical implications for their use during and beyond this public health crisis are discussed, including data governance and individual privacy issues.

Digital contact-tracing adoption in the COVID-19 pandemic: IT governance for collective action at the societal level

“…Governance approaches leading to more widespread use of proximity tracing are expected to have better outcomes and should hence be chosen. On the one hand, early empirical findings suggest that mandated enforcement of proximity tracing adoption would yield the best health outcomes (Urbaczewski & Lee, 2020). However, such an approach would be considered intolerable or may even be illegal in many societies, particularly Western ones.…”

“…While early research indicates the efficacy of the approach (Urbaczewski & Lee, 2020), proximity tracing will only be effective and achieve its intended health, economic and societal benefits if a significant user base adopts and uses the service (Ferretti et al, 2020). Hence, in addition to design considerations (Trang et al, 2020), appropriate governance approaches are required to ensure rapid, populationwide adoption of digital proximity tracing.…”

The Role of Transparency, Trust, and Social Influence on Uncertainty Reduction in Times of Pandemics: Empirical Study on the Adoption of COVID-19 Tracing Apps

“…However, the penetration rate in several countries as of October 2020 was far below this value, which illustrates the imperative for action to realize the potential of contact tracing apps [ 20 ]. Although previous studies have focused on the effectiveness [ 14 , 17 , 19 , 21 ] or technical specifications of COVID-19 tracing apps [ 22 ], none have examined the factors that affect a rapid and widespread adoption of a COVID-19 tracing app after its release.…”

“…This brief review aims to outline the characteristics of automated contact tracing apps for identifying contacts at risk and controlling disease transmission in humans. So far, several countries and some regions have developed and introduced independent COVID-19 tracing apps, which differ in administrative procedure and technical configuration [ 21 ]. Two major technical approaches exist: (1) GPS data is used to determine whether individuals, respective to their devices, were located within a geographical proximity for a defined period of time and (2) Bluetooth Low Energy is used to track the concrete proximity and exchange encrypted tokens with other devices in the defined proximity [ 30 , 31 ].…”

COVID-19 as External Enabler of entrepreneurship practice and research

“…Fifth, the COVID-19 crisis illustrates the logical and temporal interplay between several different sources of enablement. The pandemic is not a single event but rather a sequence of enabling elements, such as the health crisis itself, the policy responses implemented or lifted in response, depending on the levels of infections and spread, new technologies such as those developed for contact tracing (e.g., Trang et al, 2020 ), crowd monitoring (e.g., Adam et al, 2020 ), or contagion control (e.g., Urbaczweski & Lee, 2020 ), and emerging sociocultural changes that come in its wake both in positive (e.g., resilient communities, citizen aid for the elderly) and negative fashion (e.g., anti-Coronavirus demonstrations, violence, and protest).…”