Attitudes Towards the Use of COVID-19 Apps and Its Associated Factors

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been significantly changing people's daily lives as social activities are limited to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. New technologies, especially mobiles apps, have been widely applied to help with reducing the spread of the pandemic. However, although these apps bring many benefits, it also raises privacy issues given the amount of user information being collected and shared. The goal of this study is to understand individuals' attitudes towards the privacy concerns on using COVID-19 apps, and their expectations on the privacy protections. By conducting the survey and collecting responses, results found that majority of the participants expressed privacy concerns on COVID-19 apps, and participants with different socioeconomic status may have different levels of willingness to use the app. Results from this study not only provide guidance for the government and app service providers on the implementation of appropriate safeguards, but also address on the needs of privacy protections for the vulnerable groups.

Better Addressing Diverse Accessibility Issues in Emerging Apps: A Case Study using COVID-19 Apps

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in introducing a large number of "emerging apps" to the mobile app market. These apps were developed and deployed quickly to address the urgency of the situation. This gave us an indication that the cycle of having new emerging apps will likely reoccur in every upcoming emergency in the future e.g. for advice and guidance during bush fires, floods, other pandemics, etc. We carried out an in-depth analysis of user reviews and version history release notes for 30 COVID-19 apps that were developed in a great hurry in 2020. We identified many diverse accessibility issues that exist, not just related to conventional challenged end-user accessibility issues, but including the ability to register, access, download, and use from different app stores in different countries and for different end-users. From this large-scale analysis, we developed a new advisory tool for software developers of emerging apps to avoid many of the wide accessibility issues presented in these COVID-19 apps. A user evaluation of our prototype tool with 13 real-world app developers indicates it will assist developers to address many of these issues prior to initial emerging app deployment.

Attitudes Towards the Use of COVID-19 Apps and Its Associated Factors

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been significantly changing people’s daily lives as social activities are limited to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. New technologies, especially mobiles apps, have been widely applied to help with reducing the spread of the pandemic. However, although these apps bring many benefits, it also raises privacy issues given the amount of user information being collected and shared. The goal of this study is to understand individuals’ attitudes towards the privacy concerns on using COVID-19 apps, and their expectations on the privacy protections. By conducting the survey and collecting responses, results found that majority of the participants expressed privacy concerns on COVID-19 apps, and participants with different socioeconomic status may have different levels of willingness to use the app. Results from this study not only provide guidance for the government and app service providers on the implementation of appropriate safeguards, but also address on the needs of privacy protections for the vulnerable groups. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Better Identifying and Addressing Diverse Issues in mHealth and Emerging Apps Using User Reviews

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, leading to a rapid expansion of mHealth apps usage. The pandemic also led to the introduction of a large number of "emerging apps"to the mobile app market. mHealth and emerging app users have reported a range of serious issues in their user reviews, which we identified and better understood after extracting, translating, analysing and classifying over 6 millions user reviews of these apps into different aspects. As evidenced by user reviews, many mHealth and emerging apps are plagued by major issues and problems. App developers could improve the quality and adoption of their apps if they had a better grasp of the major concerns raised by their users. We also link the findings from our user review analysis to the app version history release notes to better understand and identify what issues the developers of mHealth/emerging apps managed to solve or not. Investigating the association between user reviews and app updates will allow us to design a model for mHealth/emerging app developers to follow. We identified that our recommendation models and tools can assist mHealth/emerging app developers and designers in proactively identifying and preventing software and design issues before their final apps are deployed to mobile users. A proactive evaluation model and discovering mHealth/emerging issues early can save billions of dollars and avert millions of deaths a year. As a result, more people will download these apps when they believe that the updates are actually addressing and solving their problems, which will result in saving lives and improving the quality of life for people with disabilities or those who use these apps. © 2022 ACM.

Data Privacy, Regulations and Legal Issues on COVID-19 Tracking Apps: A Scoping Review.

It cannot be deniable that smartphone apps have grown exponentially and are playing a crucial role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries. This paper aims to investigate data privacy, regulations and legal issues on COVID-19 tracking apps. A literature search will be followed the PRISMA guidelines extension for a scoping review. The search will be conducted on PubMed and Google Scholar. A total of 38 articles from 7,626 articles were reviewed. Mostly articles report on data privacy. Not many articles report on regulations and legal issues. However, there are many challenges on COVID-19 applications such as security risks, privacy issues, political, ethical, and legal risks, and standardization issues.

COVID-19 Apps as a Digital Intervention Policy: A Longitudinal Panel Data Analysis in South Korea.

Many countries have developed COVID-19 tracking apps that help individuals trace and detect "people" who are likely to have come in contact with confirmed patients. However, their adoption rates remain low. This study, therefore, investigated South Koreans' adoption and usage behaviors of COVID-19 apps that detect the "place" where infectious people are found and alert people within 100m in dangerous zones. Our focus was on such apps' impact on various facets of human life . Specifically, we analyzed mobile app usage data from 5,940 panelists at the start of the pandemic in South Korea and after the first major wave (January 6 to August 2, 2020). Findings showed that higher-income and more educated individuals were more likely to adopt COVID-19 apps early, and male and low-income people tended to use the COVID-19 tracking apps more frequently. In addition, this study offered empirical evidence of health protective behaviors, such as driving, shopping online, ordering food online, and avoiding travel and public transportation, and supported social- and religious-coping for people using COVID-19 apps. The implications are valuable for policy makers to implement a digital policy to motivate people to voluntarily engage in self-protective and coping behaviors through COVID-19 apps.

Pandemic Surveillance and Racialized Subpopulations: Mitigating Vulnerabilities in COVID-19 Apps.

Debates about effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have emphasized the paramount importance of digital tracing technology in suppressing the disease. So far, discussions about the ethics of this technology have focused on privacy concerns, efficacy, and uptake. However, important issues regarding power imbalances and vulnerability also warrant attention. As demonstrated in other forms of digital surveillance, vulnerable subpopulations pay a higher price for surveillance measures. There is reason to worry that some types of COVID-19 technology might lead to the employment of disproportionate profiling, policing, and criminalization of marginalized groups. It is, thus, of crucial importance to interrogate vulnerability in COVID-19 apps and ensure that the development, implementation, and data use of this surveillance technology avoids exacerbating vulnerability and the risk of harm to surveilled subpopulations, while maintaining the benefits of data collection across the whole population. This paper outlines the major challenges and a set of values that should be taken into account when implementing disease surveillance technology in the pandemic response.