TY - GEN
T1 - Irish Attitudes Toward COVID Tracker App & Privacy
T2 - 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2021
AU - Lohar, Pintu
AU - Xie, Guodong
AU - Bendechache, Malika
AU - Brennan, Rob
AU - Celeste, Edoardo
AU - Trestian, Ramona
AU - Tal, Irina
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Owner/Author.
PY - 2021/8/17
Y1 - 2021/8/17
N2 - Contact tracing apps used in tracing and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 have sparked discussions and controversies worldwide. The major concerns in relation to these apps are around privacy. Ireland was in general praised for the design of its COVID tracker app, and the transparency through which privacy issues were addressed. However, the "voice"of the Irish public was not really heard or analysed. This study aimed to analyse the Irish public sentiment towards privacy and COVID tracker app. For this purpose we have conducted sentiment analysis on Twitter data collected from public Twitter accounts from Republic of Ireland. We collected COVID-19 related tweets generated in Ireland over a period of time from January 1, 2020 up to December 31, 2020 in order to perform sentiment analysis on this data set. Moreover, the study performed sentiment analysis on the feedback received from a national survey on privacy conducted in Republic of Ireland. The findings of the study reveal a significant criticism towards the app that relate to privacy concerns, but other aspects of the app as well. The findings also reveal some positive attitude towards the fight against COVID-19, but these are not necessarily related to the technological solutions employed for this purpose. The findings of the study contributed to the formulation of useful recommendations communicated to the relevant Irish actors.
AB - Contact tracing apps used in tracing and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 have sparked discussions and controversies worldwide. The major concerns in relation to these apps are around privacy. Ireland was in general praised for the design of its COVID tracker app, and the transparency through which privacy issues were addressed. However, the "voice"of the Irish public was not really heard or analysed. This study aimed to analyse the Irish public sentiment towards privacy and COVID tracker app. For this purpose we have conducted sentiment analysis on Twitter data collected from public Twitter accounts from Republic of Ireland. We collected COVID-19 related tweets generated in Ireland over a period of time from January 1, 2020 up to December 31, 2020 in order to perform sentiment analysis on this data set. Moreover, the study performed sentiment analysis on the feedback received from a national survey on privacy conducted in Republic of Ireland. The findings of the study reveal a significant criticism towards the app that relate to privacy concerns, but other aspects of the app as well. The findings also reveal some positive attitude towards the fight against COVID-19, but these are not necessarily related to the technological solutions employed for this purpose. The findings of the study contributed to the formulation of useful recommendations communicated to the relevant Irish actors.
KW - COVID-19
KW - privacy
KW - Sentiment Analysis
KW - tracker app
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85113223759&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3465481.3469193
DO - 10.1145/3465481.3469193
M3 - Conference Publication
AN - SCOPUS:85113223759
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 17 August 2021 through 20 August 2021
ER -