UK-SPS Seminar:2nd March-Responsibly Encouraging Adoption of Contact Tracing

The UK-SPS Seminar 2nd March 2022: 

 Speaker: Elissa M. Redmiles (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems)

Title: Learning from the People: Responsibly Encouraging Adoption of Contact Tracing Apps

Abstract: At the beginning of the pandemic contact tracing apps proliferated as a potential solution to scaling infection tracking and response. While significant focus was put on developing privacy protocols for these apps, relatively less attention was given to understanding why, and why not, users might adopt them. Yet, for these technological solutions to benefit public health, users must be willing to adopt these apps. In this talk I showcase the value of taking a descriptive ethics approach to setting best practices in this new domain. Descriptive ethics, introduced by the field of moral philosophy, determines best practices by learning directly from the user — observing people’s preferences and inferring best practice from that behavior — instead of exclusively relying on experts’ normative decisions. This talk presents an empirically-validated framework of user’s decision inputs to adopt COVID19 contact tracing apps, including app accuracy, privacy, benefits, and mobile costs. Using predictive models of users’ likelihood to install COVID apps based on quantifications of these factors, I show how high the bar is for achieving adoption. I conclude by discussing a large-scale field study in which we put our survey and experimental results into practice to help the state of Louisiana advertise their COVID app through a series of randomized controlled Google Ads experiments.

Bio: Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles is a faculty member and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. She uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand users’ security, privacy, and online safety-related decision-making processes. Her work has been featured in popular press publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, Wired, Business Insider, and CNET and has been recognized with multiple paper awards at USENIX Security and ACM CCS. Dr. Redmiles has additionally served as a consultant and researcher at multiple institutions, including Microsoft Research, Facebook, the World Bank, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the University of Zurich.

Please feel free to forward to others who might be interested. 

UK-SPS is an inter-university seminar series on cyber security and privacy. Seminar details are also advertised on our website, calendar and Twitter, and recordings will be available on our YouTube channel afterwards. 

Last modified: Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:29:28 GMT