Towards a Taxonomy for Evaluating Societal Concerns of Contact Tracing Apps

Abstract

Contact Tracing (CT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses, such as Covid-19. Given near ubiquitous societal usage of mobile devices, governments globally are choosing to augment manual CT with CT applications (CTAs) on smart phones. While a plethora of solutions have been spawned, their overall effectiveness is based on majority population uptake. Unfortunately, their rapid deployment and the nature of the information they gather has prompted a variety of user concerns such as information privacy and Data Protection (DP). Therefore selecting an optimal solution to maximise user trust and uptake is crucial. In this work, we present our initial deliberations towards a CTA evaluation taxonomy for societal concerns. This is a subset of a larger taxonomy which is being developed as part of the Science Foundation Ireland project - COVIGILANT, which will ultimately be utilized to evaluate and compare numerous CTAs to select the optimal solution for a given population. In this paper we present our preliminary CTAs with respect to the societal concerns of security, data protection and transparency. We then elaborate on these CTAs by means of two illustrative examples in order to promote discussion, evaluation and refinement.