When faced with the medical and economic consequences of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic, governments around the world sought digital solutions to contain the spread of the virus. This was done in particular through Contact Tracing Applications (CTAs), which were initially designed to notify users they came in contact with a known Covid-positive individual. CTAs have been described as “one of the most important public health measures for addressing infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics” (NIH Record, 2021, p. 6). However, the adoption speed and scale necessary for the CTA to effectively reduce the spread of the virus soon appeared to be overwhelming as studies estimated that 80% of smartphone users or 56% of a given population would have to use the application (Hinch et al., 2020). These figures vary greatly according to reproduction rate (Hellewell et al., 2020)1. This meant that governments were plunged into a CTA policy conundrum: rapid and massive adoption at the scale of entire populations was required, but coercive measures aimed at boosting adoption could crystallize fears regarding CTAs and prove to be counterproductive.
CTAs were launched in challenging times that were characterized by feelings of distrust towards governments, political institutions, and scientists. In both North America (Bagchi et al., 2020) and Europe (France24, 2020), disapproval levels ran high against the measures taken to fight the pandemic. This climate of distrust was reinforced by the “overall skepticism of the technology sector in recent years” (Bagchi et al., 2020). Although the use CTAs has been described as a moral obligation (NIH Record, 2020), adoption rates of early CTAs remained low in many countries including France (Viseur, 2021).
CTA downloads in France remained extremely low for over a year from their launch until the government announced that a health pass would be implemented, which would be required to attend public gatherings and gain access to social spaces beginning 9 August 2021. Designed for citizens to prove their health or vaccination status using a QR code, this individual certificate could be integrated into the CTA or printed. Following the implementation of these measures, downloads of the application reached 30 million on 18 August 2021 and 50 million2 on 24 January 2022 (Vitard, 2022). These measures, however, gave rise to academic controversy (Arruabarrena, 2020; Rowe, 2020), generated a great deal of fraud (Michel, 2022), and fueled further distrust towards the government among the general public, the press (Casilli et al., 2020), and civil liberties groups (La Quadrature du Net, 2021).
Because CTAs were developed as a collective tool to address a collective action problem (Riemer et al., 2020), research on their adoption has recently developed social approaches to the privacy calculus in order to understand how benefits to society influence individual decisions (Hassandoust et al., 2021; Trang et al., 2020; Trkman et al., 2021). Possible surveillance, discrimination, and the alienation dynamics in CTA design and implementation have all been denounced (Rowe et al., 2020). These fears have only partially been integrated into a privacy calculus to assess their influence on adoption decisions (Abramova et al., 2022). If, however, individuals’ prosocial attitudes influence the assessment of the application’s benefits, we can hypothesize that these attitudes also influence their assessment of the risks.
Therefore, building on a survey of French citizens, we analyzed how these individual and social risks and benefits influence CTA adoption and the intention to integrate the health pass into the application. In particular, we investigated this intriguing privacy calculus at a time in France when individuals were not yet subject to the restrictive measures of a mandatory health pass for accessing certain places. This meant that people still had a certain amount of freedom to weigh the individual and social risks and benefits of CTA adoption. This investigation aims to help understand the factors driving CTA adoption, if some of them can help prevent restrictive measures, and on a theoretical level, if it makes sense to consider collective factors in cases when digital technologies include this social dimension.
Our research objective can be divided into two main research questions:
RQ1: How do the individual risks and benefits associated with the use of a CTA influence its adoption and intention to integrate the health pass?
RQ2: How do the social risks and benefits associated with the use of a CTA influence its adoption and intention to integrate the health pass?
In the highly political global crisis context of the application’s deployment, it is not possible to explain CTA adoption and intention to disclose data through the privacy calculus alone as adoption manifests differently when it is voluntary, as in the United States, encouraged, such as in Australia, nudged in France (Rowe et al., 2020), or mandated like in South Korea and China (Riemer et al., 2020). Beyond the technical features and implementation characteristics that vary from country to country (Sun et al., 2021), the CTA literature highlights other factors that influence these choices such as personal innovativeness, the social influence of peers (Jansen-Kosterink et al., 2020), and distrust towards the government (Jennings et al., 2021; Rowe et al., 2020). This raises a third research question:
First, we will present our approach to the privacy calculus, the social factors we integrate into it, and develop eight research hypotheses to answer our research questions. The risks and benefits of information disclosure largely depend on the type of information collected, data sensitivity, political context, type of technological application, and cultural variables (Smith et al., 2011). We will then describe the French case of the TousAntiCovid application. The methodology of the survey and its measuring instruments will then be presented, followed by the results. Finally, the practical and theoretical scope of our results will be discussed.