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Are people willing to use contact tracing mobile phone apps for #COVID19 ? As a personal weekend project, I spent some money I got back from a canceled AirBnB booking in a quick and dirty survey. Results in my first Twitter thread ever. 1/16
For about 100 Euro I got 108 US respondents in SurveyMonkey. Not representative but at least roughly balanced in terms of gender and age. The first question was: "Are you able to turn on and off the Bluetooth connection of your smartphone?". 95% of the people say yes. 2/16
This is not surprising, given that samples like this one tend to be more digitally literate than the general population (check @kmmunger's https://osf.io/3ncmk/ ). If we didn't get a high percentage, Bluetooth usability would be a big problem for contact tracing apps. 3/16
The second question was "Would you install an app on your smartphone to share your Bluetooth connection data to trace Coronavirus infections?" The majority of respondents said "definitely would" or "probably would", but still far from an ample majority. 4/16
The third question was the same but for GPS location data. Here the result is very similar to the case of Bluetooth connections asked before. This is somewhat surprising given that location data is more revealing than anonymized contacts through Bluetooth. 5/16
The fourth question was "If you were diagnosed with Coronavirus, would you allow your information to be shared with phone companies to search for people you might have infected?" For this, the intention is higher, with more than 60% saying that they would or probably would. 6/16
The intention to share data after being diagnosed with COVID-19 is crucial for contact tracing apps to work!
(Note for armchair epidemiologists: I always said "coronavirus" in the survey to avoid technical jargon https://twitter.com/markhumphries/status/1248214342618628096) 7/16
(Note for armchair epidemiologists: I always said "coronavirus" in the survey to avoid technical jargon https://twitter.com/markhumphries/status/1248214342618628096) 7/16
The last question was "Do you agree that healthcare authorities and phone companies must start sharing health, contact and location data to trace infections of Coronavirus?" The most frequent answer is "Neither agree nor disagree", with less than 20% disagreeing. 8/16
This high frequency in the middle is surprising, given how polarizing this topic can be among experts. It also shows that a small minority of respondents are against the use of the data already owned by tech companies, something that @rcuevasrumin and @acrumin have proposed. 9/16
How bad would be a 50% penetration rate of contact tracing apps? From 50%, the app starts being effective to control an outbreak, but effective penetration should be above 60% to rely on contact tracing apps. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10222 10/16
Note that the penetration in that plot is the effective rate. Not all phones would work, people forget to use the app, Bluetooth has errors, etc. If just the intention in a survey is about 50%, the effective rate would be insufficient given the simulations above. 11/16
I see two solutions to this problem.
The first is a massive information and mobilization campaign to increase the adoption of the app. Scientific communication is critical for this. A good early example is this comic: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/. 12/16
The first is a massive information and mobilization campaign to increase the adoption of the app. Scientific communication is critical for this. A good early example is this comic: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/. 12/16
The second is the mandatory use of the app. If anonymity is guaranteed for app users (e.g. what https://www.pepp-pt.org/ aims at), this could be an option that does not threaten individual privacy rights. But it's important to have a long public discussion about this before! 13/16
For more content on the mandatory use idea, check @ccansu's article: https://medium.com/@cansucanca/why-mandatory-privacy-preserving-digital-contact-tracing-is-the-ethical-measure-against-covid-19-a0d143b7c3b6. 14/16
In any case, please take my armchair sociologist's survey with a big grain of salt. I hope this thread motivates sociologists to run a better-designed representative survey not just in the US (and also using another platform like MT or Qualtrics). 15/16
To sum up, contact tracing is a promising technological approach to control outbreaks of #COVID19, but we need to keep its social component in mind if we want it to be effective! 16/16
