Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many across the globe. Mobile tracing and exposure apps have been used to mitigate the problem and curb the spread of the virus. Wide exposure of the apps is in need for them to be effective. However, concerns about factors like data privacy and security affect users’ perception and participation in them. In this study, our goal is to investigate how information privacy and security may impact users’ ratings of COVID-19 apps. In addition, we explore how political typology also influences the ratings. We considered 31 apps related to COVID-19 exposure and tracing in the United States. From these apps, we managed to scrape data related to 29 from Google play digital store and extracted 1,832 reviews. After analyzing the user reviews our preliminary findings show that the polarity and subjectivity of the review are significantly associated with the reviewers’ apps ratings. Interestingly, we find this relationship intensifies when security and privacy issues are addressed in the reviews. In addition, we find that political ideology plays a significant role in how users rate COVID apps. The findings of this research have implications for both theory and practice.
Recommended Citation
Alnsour, Yazan and Juma'h, Ahmad, "Analytical study of the COVID apps users’ perception about data security and privacy" (2021). WISP 2021 Proceedings. 3.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/wisp2021/3