Do You Have COVID-19? How to Increase the Use of Diagnostic and Contact-Tracing Apps

"The findings presented here may travel well to other related policy areas where safety is a concern, such as vaccination."

Despite the potential benefits of COVID-19 contact tracing and self-diagnostic smartphone applications (apps), downloads and intentions to use have been lower than acceptance levels. The adoption of these apps is an instance of a public policy aiming for societal benefit that requires individuals to undertake actions that may have real or perceived costs - in this case, related to privacy (fear that the apps may be tracking whereabouts or accumulating personal information). To that end, governments have focused app-related communication campaigns on the work they have been doing to ensure privacy. This study explores how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influences adoption among Mexican adults. It highlights the unintended consequences of addressing data privacy issues directly in governments' communications campaigns, with the policy implications that result.

The researchers ran a survey experiment in a sample of 23,184 individuals from Mexico recruited through Facebook advertisements and email campaigns to participate in a COVID-19 survey. They randomly allocated respondents to four treatment conditions, including a pure control and three treatment vignettes. The assumption was that the latter type of vignettes may act on judgment and behaviour by activating mental concepts through subtle cues - that is, through priming.

Specifically, the Treatment 1 (T1) group received a vignette focusing on the role of Facebook as a tool to connect people, and the Treatment 2 (T2) group was exposed to a vignette highlighting the work the Mexican government has been doing to make it possible for citizens to conduct bureaucratic procedures online rather than in person, with resulting gains in convenience. The Treatment 3 (T3) group was exposed to a vignette that emulated the adoption-promotion messages that many countries are providing their citizens: "the government is working hard to ensure data privacy protection." T1 and T2 thus do not mention privacy concerns, while T3 does.

Respondents in every group, including the control, were then asked whether they would be willing to download a COVID-19 diagnostic app, and, separately, whether they would be willing to download a contact tracing app. The experiment found that highlighting the fact that the government is working hard to ensure data privacy decreases the average respondent's willingness to adopt by about 3 percentage points for the contact tracing app and 4 percentage points for the diagnostic app, in comparison with the control condition. In contrast, the other two treatments either had no effect (T1) or increased willingness to download the app (T2) by about 2 percentage points. This positive effect may be due to the fact that this treatment highlights the government's positive record or that it indirectly emphasises the benefits of using online services in general, thereby leading individuals to focus on the benefits of the apps rather than on their risks.

To shed light on the mechanism linking treatments and outcomes, the researchers looked at the Yes/No questions asked right after each of the three treatment vignettes (e.g., after T3, the following question was asked: "Is data protection an important issue for you?"). Those individuals who answered "Yes" to that T3 question were less likely to choose "Definitely yes" as a response to the download question than those who answered "No" (70% vs 76%). The researchers take this finding as additional evidence in support of the idea that priming individuals to think about an area of concern to them (in this case, data privacy), even if the purpose is to assuage their concerns (as in treatment T3), could backfire by discouraging the desired behaviour (i.e., willingness to download the contact tracing app). That is, instead of reassuring the citizen, mentioning privacy concerns could convey the message that data privacy is something that the citizen should be worrying about. This reaction is stronger for those who most agree with the prime, and it is robust to two different wordings of the prime.

The researchers conclude that an effective app promotion policy must understand individuals' reservations and be wary of unintended reactions to naive reassurances. The perceived convenience of or satisfaction with online services in general are additional drivers of app adoption, and overall a better strategy to motivate compliance with the policy.