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Not Only for Contact Tracing: Use of Belgium's Contact Tracing App among Young Adults

Published: 11 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Many countries developed and deployed contact tracing apps to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Prior research explored people's intent to install these apps, which is necessary to ensure effectiveness. However, adopting contact tracing apps is not enough on its own, and much less is known about how people actually use these apps. Exploring app use can help us identify additional failures or risk points in the app life cycle. In this study, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with young adult users of Belgium's contact-tracing app, Coronalert. The interviews were conducted approximately a year after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings offer potential design directions for addressing issues identified in prior work - such as methods for maintaining long-term use and better integrating with the local health systems - and offer insight into existing design tensions such as the trade-off between maintaining users' privacy (by minimizing the personal data collected) and users' desire to have more information about an exposure incident. We distill from our results and the results of prior work a framework of people's decision points in contact-tracing app use that can serve to motivate careful design of future contact tracing technology.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Life fits home: Exploring people's experience with a COVID-19 tracing app in Turkey through a qualitative studyMobile Media & Communication10.1177/2050157924123550312:3(584-601)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Privacy Practices of Female mHealth Apps in a Post-Roe WorldProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642521(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Individual level analysis of digital proximity tracing for COVID-19 in Belgium highlights major bottlenecksNature Communications10.1038/s41467-023-42518-614:1Online publication date: 23-Oct-2023

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
    Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 6, Issue 4
    December 2022
    1534 pages
    EISSN:2474-9567
    DOI:10.1145/3580286
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 11 January 2023
    Published in IMWUT Volume 6, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. COVID-19
    2. Contact Tracing
    3. Decision Model
    4. Interviews
    5. Privacy
    6. User Study

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    View all
    • (2024)Life fits home: Exploring people's experience with a COVID-19 tracing app in Turkey through a qualitative studyMobile Media & Communication10.1177/2050157924123550312:3(584-601)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Exploring Privacy Practices of Female mHealth Apps in a Post-Roe WorldProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642521(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2023)Individual level analysis of digital proximity tracing for COVID-19 in Belgium highlights major bottlenecksNature Communications10.1038/s41467-023-42518-614:1Online publication date: 23-Oct-2023

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