Public attitudes towards privacy in COVID-19 times in the Republic of Ireland: A pilot study

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on designing methods aimed at assessing Irish public attitudes regarding privacy in COVID-19 times and their influence on the adoption of COVID-19 spread control technology such as the COVID tracker app. The success of such technologies is dependent on their adoption rate and privacy concerns may be a factor delaying or preventing thus adoption. An online questionnaire was built to collect: demographic data, participant’s general privacy profile using the Privacy Segmentation Index (PSI) which classifies individuals into 3 groups (privacy fundamentalists, pragmatists, and unconcerned), and the attitudes toward privacy in COVID-19 times. The questionnaire was shared via websites and social networks. The data was collected between 27/08/2020 to 27/9/2020. We received and analyzed 258 responses. The initial pilot study found that almost 73% of the respondents were pragmatists or unconcerned about privacy when it came to sharing their private data. Comparable results were obtained with other privacy studies that have employed PSI. The pilot indicates a huge increase, from 12% pre-pandemic to 61% during the pandemic, of people willing to share their data. The questionnaire developed following this study is further used in a national survey on privacy in COVID-19 times.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• privacy
• pandemic
• attitude
• information
• data

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland through COVID Rapid Response programme grant number 20/COV/0229 and through the grant 13/RC/2094 co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern and Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie) and the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology (www.adaptcentre.ie) [grant number 13/RC/2106]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.„

Notes

1. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/how-you-and-your-technology-can-help-fight-covid-19-1.4229806

2. Commission Recommendation (EU) 2020/518 of 8 April 2020 on a common Union toolbox for the use of technology and data to combat and exit from the COVID-19 crisis, in particular concerning mobile applications and the use of anonymized mobility data. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reco/2020/518/oj

3. https://www.adaptcentre.ie

4. https://www.lero.ie/

5. COVID Tracker Ireland is a digital contact tracing app released by the Irish Government and the Health Service Executive on 7 July 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Ireland.

6. https://www.thejournal.ie/covid-tracker-app-5237727-Oct2020/

7. HSE official website: www.hse.ie

8. Future of Privacy Forum, official website: https://fpf.org/

9. Central Statistics Office, official website: https://www.cso.ie/

10. Ordnance Survey Ireland, official website: https://www.osi.ie/

11. Irish Council for Civil Liberties, official website: https://www.iccl.ie/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland[13/RC/2094,13/RC/2106,20/COV/0229].