Sharing is caring: willingness to share personal data through contact tracing apps in China, Germany, and the US

ABSTRACT

Are citizens more willing to share private data in (health) crises? We study citizens’ willingness to share personal data through COVID-19 contact tracing apps (CTAs). Based on a cross-national online survey with 6,464 respondents from China, Germany, and the US, we find considerable variation in how and what data respondents are willing to share through CTAs. Drawing on the privacy calculus theory and the trade-off model of privacy and security, we find that during the COVID-19 pandemic, crisis perceptions seem to have only limited influence on people’s willingness to share personal data through CTAs. The findings further show that the data type to be shared determines the suitability of the privacy calculus theory to explain people’s willingness to transfer personal data: the theory can explain the willingness to share sensitive data, but cannot explain the willingness to share less sensitive data.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• contact tracing apps
• data sharing
• public opinion
• privacy concerns

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the Volkswagen Foundation Planning Grant on ‘State-business relations in the Field of Artificial Intelligence and its Implications for Society’ (grant 95172). We are also very grateful for excellent research assistance by Danqi Guo and Anna Heidemann. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A previous version of this paper included further hypotheses on the influence of people’s CTA perception on willingness to share data through CTAs. These hypotheses have been excluded during the first round of revision in response to a reviewer’s concern about the high number of hypotheses tested in the earlier version.

2 To focus our article on the most important data types, we do not analyze phone number and email address in detail, but provide regression results in the Appendix in Figure A1. While in the case of the Chinese Health Code, the sharing of users’ personal identity, phone number and real-time location is mandatory, in the German and US cases it is not.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Volkswagen Foundation: [Grant Number 95172].

Notes on contributors

Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla

Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla is Professor of State and Society of Modern China at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include local governance and energy and resource governance focusing on rural China.

Genia Kostka

Genia Kostka is Professor of Chinese Politics at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests are China's digital transformation, environmental politics, and political economy.