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Why Do People Not Install Corona-Warn-App? Evidence from Social Media

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Information Systems (EMCIS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 437))

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Abstract

This study investigates why the Corona-Warn-App, which was meticulously designed in Germany to interrupt the COVID-19’s chain of infection, was not installed by the majority of the population and therefore failed to achieve what it was created to do. We collect natural language data by scraping 70,529 related comments from Twitter, and apply sentiment analysis to understand the content. We distinguish negative comments into two categories: technical issues, e.g. crashes and errors, and trust-related issues, e.g. concerns about privacy protection. After a more detailed manual check, we find that some criticisms of the app are not accurate. Surprisingly, more than 40% of trust-related denunciations are based purely on misinformation spread by users. For example, a user complains about a violation of data privacy, when, in fact, the app is fully GDPR-compliant. Our study provides evidence for the intentional promulgation of misinformation to lower trust in life-saving technologies during a pandemic, and calls for a more careful evaluation of the technology’s performance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.coronawarn.app/en/privacy/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/blob/master/pruefsteine.md.

  3. 3.

    https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.html.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/issues/465.

  5. 5.

    https://www.coronawarn.app/en/faq/#ios135.

  6. 6.

    https://www.coronawarn.app/en/faq/#background_updates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESCP Business School, Berlin Campus, Heubnerweg 8-10, 14059, Berlin, Germany

    Chuanwen Dong, Sanjana Bharambe & Markus Bick

Authors
  1. Chuanwen Dong
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  2. Sanjana Bharambe
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  3. Markus Bick
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Correspondence to Chuanwen Dong .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Marinos Themistocleous

  2. British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Maria Papadaki

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Dong, C., Bharambe, S., Bick, M. (2022). Why Do People Not Install Corona-Warn-App? Evidence from Social Media. In: Themistocleous, M., Papadaki, M. (eds) Information Systems. EMCIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 437. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95947-0_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95947-0_21

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