Public acceptance of privacy-encroaching policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The nature of the COVID-19 pandemic may require governments to use privacy-encroaching technologies to help contain its spread. One technology involves co-location tracking through mobile Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth to permit health agencies to monitor people’s contact with each other, thereby triggering targeted social-distancing when a person turns out to be infected. The effectiveness of tracking relies on the willingness of the population to support such privacy encroaching measures. We report the results of two large surveys in the United Kingdom, conducted during the peak of the pandemic, that probe people’s attitudes towards various tracking technologies. The results show that by and large there is widespread acceptance for co-location tracking. Acceptance increases when the measures are explicitly time-limited and come with opt-out clauses or other assurances of privacy. Another possible future technology to control the pandemic involves “immunity passports”, which could be issued to people who carry antibodies for the COVID-19 virus, potentially implying that they are immune and therefore unable to spread the virus to other people. Immunity passports have been considered as a potential future step to manage the pandemic. We probe people’s attitudes towards immunity passports and find considerable support overall, although around 20% of the public strongly oppose passports.

Behavioural responses to Covid-19 health certification: a rapid review

“…While three were available on pre-print servers, most were unlikely to be published in peer reviewed journals and were often released as public opinion surveys. However, it is worth noting that, where they addressed similar questions, findings from the high-quality studies [ 31 , 33 ] were similar to those from studies judged to be medium [ 32 , 34 , 35 ] or low [ 39 ] quality (i.e., of greater risk of bias).…”

“…The percentage in favour of immunity certificates for use for the right to work was much lower than in the case of travel. Across three studies in three countries carried out in April – September (n ranging from 1000 to 1500) support ranged from 20 to 51% [ 31 , 33 , 39 ].…”

“…There was little information in most studies on how any of the attitudes described above varied across social groups. In the UK, one study found that acceptance increased with age, greater trust in government, and higher perceived risk of COVID-19 [ 31 ].…”

Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature (Preprint)

“…Where location tracking is used, it should be an opt-in feature [121] because invasion of personal privacy can be a significant deterrent to downloading and using a DCTA, and the use of geolocation data has recently been the cause of privacy losing events associated with app use [85,140].…”

“…There should be an agreed timeline and criteria for when the API and DCTA infrastructure is to be dismantled [76,121,124,141] because there are significant privacy concerns that technology companies and governments could use DCTAs to enable greater surveillance after the pandemic [26,37,65,66,76]. Using an API comes with the risk that personal data may be misused or processed unlawfully.…”