ABSTRACT
As a key constituent of China's approach to fighting COVID-19, Health Code apps (HCAs) not only serve the pandemic control imperatives but also exercise the agency of digital surveillance. As such, HCAs pave a new avenue for ongoing discussions on contact tracing solutions and privacy amid the global pandemic. This article attends to the perceived privacy protection among HCA users via the lens of the contextual integrity theory. Drawing on an online survey of adult HCA users in Wuhan and Hangzhou (N = 1551), we find users’ perceived convenience, attention towards privacy policy, trust in government, and acceptance of government purposes regarding HCA data management are significant contributors to users’ perceived privacy protection in using the apps. By contrast, users’ frequency of mobile privacy protection behaviors has limited influence, and their degrees of perceived protection do not vary by sociodemographic status. These findings shed new light on China's distinctive approach to pandemic control with respect to the state's expansion of big data-driven surveillance capacity. Also, the findings foreground the heuristic value of contextual integrity theory to examine controversial digital surveillance in non-Western contexts. Put tougher, our findings contribute to the thriving scholarly conversations around digital privacy and surveillance in China, as well as contact tracing solutions and privacy amid the global pandemic. © The Author(s) 2022.
ABSTRACT
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people have been forced to work from home. Particularly during video conferences, workers basically invite their colleagues, co-workers and supervisors into their homes, sacrificing portions of their privacy in the process. In this paper, we investigate which home-related and work-related factors are perceived as relevant for privacy. We asked participants to indicate their preferences for videoconferencing settings in various scenarios and also asked about their personal experiences. The results show that power distance plays a role, but that group size and familiarity with other group members are more decisive factors. We discuss implications of our findings in terms of user awareness and the benefits of different context-based default settings for videoconferencing privacy settings. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
We present an empirical study exploring how privacy influences the acceptance of vaccination certificate (VC) deployments across different realistic usage scenarios. The study employed the privacy framework of Contextual Integrity, which has been shown to be particularly effective in capturing people's privacy expectations across different contexts. We use a vignette methodology, where we selectively manipulate salient contextual parameters to learn whether and how they affect people's attitudes towards VCs. We surveyed 890 participants from a demographically-stratified sample of the US population to gauge the acceptance and overall attitudes towards possible VC deployments to enforce vaccination mandates and the different information flows VCs might entail. Analysis of results collected as part of this study is used to derive general normative observations about different possible VC practices and to provide guidance for the possible deployments of VCs in different contexts. © 2022 Owner/Author.