Cultural concerns affect the willingness to share personal data in order to reduce COVID-19 transmission

A study of culture, civic concerns and privacy privacy affects the willingness of people to share personal location information to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in their communities, a new study has found.

Such sharing includes giving public health authorities access to their geographic information through data collected from phone calls, mobile apps, credit card purchases, trackers wristband or other technologies.

It was reported in the International Journal of Geo-Information, the study will help public health officials better optimize their COVID-19 mitigation strategies for specific cultural contexts, the researchers said.

The scientists evaluated survey responses from 306 people living in the United States and South Korea. Participants were recruited through social media and were younger and more educated than the general population of these countries. Conducted in late June and early July, the studies asked participants to share their privacy concerns, perceptions of social benefit and acceptance of various COVID-19 mitigation efforts that include its collecting geographic data from individuals.

“For all intents and purposes, we wanted to see how these factors influenced people’s willingness to share their data,” said Junghwan Kim, a graduate student in geography and geographic information science at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign led the research by Mei-Po Kwan, professor of geography at the University of China in Hong Kong and Kim’s doctoral advisor at I University.

Understanding the factors influencing these decisions is critical in designing effective public health initiatives, Kim said. What works in one society may not be feasible in a different part of the world.

Participants answered questions about routine contact detection, where public health officials call those positive for the virus to interview them about where they were and who they might be exposed to. Such methods are time-consuming and inefficient, however, so the researchers asked participants for their ideas toward public health efforts that collect geolocation information from the their phones, tracking what they are buying with a credit card, asking them to wear a bandage or asking them to carry a “travel certificate” indicating that they have tested negative for COVID- 19.

The studies also asked people to assess how they felt about public disclosure of the location, sex and age information of those who tested positive for the virus, or for sharing public places. visited without disclosing their gender and age.

The team found that people were more concerned about – and less likely to adopt – methods of collecting information more sensitively and privately.

Not surprisingly, we found that there is a trade-off between privacy concerns and social benefits. Therefore, there is more acceptance when one’s privacy concerns are low and the perceived social benefits are high. We also found that people in South Korea accept significantly more of the mitigation efforts than those in the U.S. ”

Junghwan Kim, Graduate Student, Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This higher uptake may be related to South Korea ‘s previous experience with Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, which is caused by a much more deadly coronavirus than the one that causes COVID-19, said Kwan. But it also seems to be a mirror of South Korean culture.

“Compared to people in the U.S., South Koreans have a stronger collective culture – than an individual -” she said. “They also have lower privacy concerns and see greater social benefits for COVID-19 mitigation measures.”

“The findings have a significant impact on public health policy,” the researchers wrote. For example, the use of a phone or handset-based GPS tracker would not be “effective in the U.S. and other countries where people accept these methods very low.” Other approaches, such as calls random phone to monitor people’s compliance with quarantine orders or use travel certificates that verify a person’s COVID-19-negative status, working better in such associations.