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Tracing Contacts With Mobile Phones to Curb the Pandemic:Topics and Stances in People’s Online Comments About the Official German Contact-Tracing App

Published: 08 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a health crisis with 90 million infections and two million deaths by the end of January 2021. To prevent an overload of medical capacities, quickly identifying potentially infected persons is vital to stop the spread of the virus. Mobile apps for tracing people’s contacts seem effective, but raise public concerns, e. g., about privacy. Hence, they are contested in public discourse. We report a large-scale NLP-supported analysis of people’s comments about the German contact-tracing app on news websites, social media and app stores. We identified prevalent topics, stances, and how commenting developed over time. We found privacy to be among the most debated topics discussed from various perspectives. Commenting peaked at one point in time, when public discourse centered on the potential tracing protocols and their privacy protection. We encourage further research on the link between the public discussions and actual adoption rates of the app.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2021
2965 pages
ISBN:9781450380959
DOI:10.1145/3411763
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 08 May 2021

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Author Tags

  1. contact tracing
  2. covid-19
  3. mobile tracing app
  4. newspaper comments
  5. pandemic
  6. public sentiments
  7. social media
  8. technology appropriation

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  • Refereed limited

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  • German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
  • Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Healthcare Internet of Things system implementations for COVID-19 preventionFrontiers in Communications and Networks10.3389/frcmn.2024.14294605Online publication date: 23-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Critical reflections on three popular computational linguistic approaches to examine Twitter discoursesPeerJ Computer Science10.7717/peerj-cs.12119(e1211)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Designing Digital COVID-19 Screening: Insights and DeliberationsInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph2005389920:5(3899)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Nurse, Give Me the News! Understanding Support for and Opposition to a COVID-19 Health Screening SystemInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph2002116420:2(1164)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Less About Privacy: Revisiting a Survey about the German COVID-19 Contact Tracing AppProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581537(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Understanding Trust and Changes in Use After a Year With the NHS COVID-19 Contact Tracing App in the United Kingdom: Longitudinal Mixed Methods StudyJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/4055824:10(e40558)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
  • (2022)The relationship between trust and attitudes towards the COVID-19 digital contact-tracing app in the UKPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.027666117:10(e0276661)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Users' Expectations, Experiences, and Concerns With COVID Alert, an Exposure-Notification AppProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35557706:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Understanding Cultural Influence on Perspectives Around Contact Tracing StrategiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555696:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Cultural Influences on Chinese Citizens’ Adoption of Digital Contact Tracing: A Human Infrastructure PerspectiveProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517572(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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