Privacy vs Health: The Role of Privacy Trade-Offs and Social Norms in the Adoption of mHealth Technologies
mHealth technologies are at the intersection of public health and multi-stakeholder cooperation and support the efficient flow of information across different actors. COVID-19 contact tracing apps were introduced in various countries as an mhealth solution to stop the spread of the virus. Although aiming for the greater good of the population through maintaining public health, the introduction of the app was accompanied by controversial debates about their privacy implications. Several countries had low adoption rates of the app. In the question of health versus privacy, several factors come into consideration. We apply a privacy calculus approach to study individuals’ intention to use COVID-19 apps under privacy trade-offs. Based on representative samples from Germany and Switzerland, we find that individual safety outweighs societal safety benefit, trust is crucial for mitigating risk perceptions, and social norms have a great impact on individual’s intentions to use.