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Achieving positive and sustainable global digital transformations is not a trivial endeavor (Basu et al., 2021; Stibe, 2020). However, at a time of the ongoing pandemic, both our scientific and technological strengths must be leveraged to develop the most efficient ways of mitigating the implications of COVID-19 with digital solutions.
Unlike any other application development, digital contact tracing has the potential to form a significant building block for this transformative time to cope with the pandemic (Walrave et al., 2020; Zeng et al., 2020). In response to the risk of another wave, new standards and processes have been developed that enable the tracing of known and unknown contacts. Traditionally, local health authorities have previously orchestrated contact tracing (identifying, contacting, and assessing risk with potentially law-enforced quarantine). Several countries are currently attempting to develop a single national digital tracing app. Mathematical models have indicated the potential of overcoming SARS-Cov2 if approximately 60% of citizens in a country use such applications (Hinch et al., 2020).
Thus, our first research question is: How can tracing and tracking apps be classified?
Both academia and industry are researching technical solutions for automized contact tracing, push-notifications for potentially infected people, and the integration of local health authorities and laboratories (e.g., SAP, 2020; see the next section for details). The majority of democratic countries encourage privacy-by-design as a guiding principle, for instance, by following the ten touchstones for the evaluation of contact tracing apps guideline by the Chaos Computer Club (2020). These touchstones follow a decentralized architecture. However, centralized approaches are in a conceptual stage—like the past initiative Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PePP-PT, 2020)—but with different protocols released, most notably in Singapore and France. Currently, there is no clear differentiation and definition in the literature between the terms COVID-19 tracing and tracking app, and their implemented functionalities or data interfaces. Thus, to understand the differences between these approaches and to leverage the potential for interaction within each of them, we must first develop a structural framework for coronavirus tracking and tracing apps and possible design and architectural decisions.
We investigate the second research question: Which factors can improve the use intention and usage of COVID-19 tracing apps and in general social-participial apps?
Understanding social and political reasons for using COVID-19 tracing apps, it is the role of the IS discipline to offer scientific insights and practical recommendations about information technology (in this research with tracing apps) and its role in coping with the crisis (Madhavan et al., 2021; Thomas et al., 2020).