Canadians Divided on Mandatory COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Canadians Divided on Mandatory COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
Ludovic Rheault and Andreea Musulan
Department of Political Science, Munk School, University of Toronto
June 3, 2020
Abstract
This note presents summary statistics from an online public opinion survey about cell phone contact tracing
conducted between May 28 and May 29. COVID-19 contact tracing apps are being deployed at a fast pace around
the world and may be an increasingly noticeable feature of Canadians’ digital environment in the months to come.
Recent surveys reported diverging results about the support for COVID-19 apps among Canadians. Our survey
data can help to clarify the distribution of public opinion on the issue. While a majority of our respondents approve
the reliance on cell phone contact tracing, support is highly contingent on the app being used on a voluntary basis.
COVID-19 apps can facilitate the industrious process of contact tracing, one of the primary methods used
by governments to contain the spread of coronavirus. A successful implementation could potentially limit the
need for large-scale restrictions on economic activities in the advent of a second wave. Human rights advocacy
groups, however, have voiced various concerns about the implementation of cell phone contact tracing. Aside
from security risks associated with the technology, COVID-19 apps may also increase the efficiency of health
authorities in imposing tests and self-isolation orders to individuals who have been in contact with an infected
person. Any measure encroaching on protected rights and freedoms is a sensitive matter, and Canadians may have
legitimate concerns about how data from COVID-19 apps will be collected, accessed and used by public authorities.
Understanding public opinion on this question is key for policy making in the months ahead.
In date of May 7, the MIT Technology Review had identified 25 countries with active COVID-19 app campaigns,
five of which making the contact tracing app mandatory (O’Neill et al., 2020). There are many more of these apps
being developed around the world: Top10VPN counted 47 globally as of May 12 (Woodhams, 2020), and close
to 100 were either in use or under development.1 Using either GPS geolocation or Bluetooth technology, these
apps have the common characteristic of keeping a record of interactions between users, for various periods of time.
When a new case of COVID-19 is identified, users who have been in contact with the infected person are notified.
Most of these COVID-19 apps are designed to inform health agencies of the identity—usually name and phone
number—of users who have been in contact with an infected individual, similar to manual contact tracing. Both
the app currently used in Alberta (ABTraceTogether) and the Apple-Google initiative are based on this approach
(Alberta, 2020; Apple/Google, 2020). An exception is the Montreal-based MILA’s COVI app, which promises to
direct these notifications to users only, hence relying on a user’s willingness to take appropriate action and reach
out to health authorities independently after receiving an alert (see https://covicanada.org/faq/; McKenna, 2020).
Previous Surveys
Recent surveys highlighted diverging trends in public opinion. A study sponsored by three Canadian Senators
indicated widespread support for COVID-19 apps among a sample of Canadian respondents to an online survey
conducted between May 2 and May 4 (Moodie et al., 2020). The study found that 80% of respondents “support the
use of mobile device data by public health officials to notify those who have been close to someone who has tested
1 See e.g. https://benlevyx.github.io/covid-tracking/ for an overview.
1positive for COVID-19” (Moodie et al., 2020, 20). A majority of respondents (65%) indicated support for imposing
the use of a contact tracing app. On the other hand, a Mainstreet Research/iPolitics poll conducted shortly after
using an interactive voice response (IRV) system found that a majority of Canadian respondents (57%) considered
unacceptable being asked to download a contact tracing app (Mainstreet Research, 2020).
The phrasing of survey questions differed in these two studies, which raises the issue of how sensitive public
opinion is to framing and contextual information. The Senate study’s question mentioned above contained a
preamble explaining the purpose and benefits of contact tracing apps. The question itself read:
If the tracking capabilities of smart phones provided public health officials with the ability to anonymously
and automatically notify all those who have been close to someone who tested positive for COVID-19,
how supportive would you be of using this capability in Canada? (Moodie et al., 2020, 34).
The response format was a four-level Likert scale. The Mainstreet Research survey question, on the other hand,
suggested (at least implicitly) a scenario where downloading the app would be mandatory:
[...] Please tell us if you think it is acceptable or not: The government asking you to download an app on
your smart-phone to track who you might come into contact with, otherwise known as contact tracing
(Mainstreet Research, 2020, 13).
It is not clear whether “the government asking you” necessarily meant enforcing the use of a COVID-19 app—a
practice currently used in other countries—but it is reasonable to assume that some respondents would interpret
the query as such. Our survey may help to reconcile both sets of results, at least partially.
Our Results
Our data come from an opt-in, online survey of 1,200 Canadians recruited using the Cint platform, a market
exchange for survey respondents that is increasingly popular for academic research. The survey used quota
sampling based on census distributions for age, gender and region. We fielded the survey in both official languages
between May 28 and May 29, 2020. Note that our survey contains randomized treatments and was primarily
designed for an upcoming study estimating sample average treatment effects, as opposed to inferring population
statistics.
We self-imposed the following criteria in drafting the questionnaire: the nature of cell phone contact tracing
must be described accurately using a simple language; the question should remain as neutral as possible (avoiding
statements emphasizing the benefits of cell phone contact tracing over the risks, or vice-versa); and the question
should make clear that cell phone contact tracing involves the participation of governments. The baseline wording
for that survey question reads:
Many COVID-19 apps are being used around the world to notify people who were in contact with
someone infected (contact tracing apps). These apps record the interactions between users by detecting
when two cell phones are close to each other.
These apps require the participation of health agencies to confirm who tested positive for COVID-19.
Do you support the government’s participation in a COVID-19 contact tracing app?
We offered three response categories: “Yes”, “Yes, but only if using the app is voluntary”, and “No”. This allows
respondents to explicitly state whether their approval is conditional on the voluntary use of a contact tracing app.
Our survey also invited respondents to clarify their position using an open-ended follow up question. The analysis of
open-ended responses will feature in the upcoming study.
2Figure 1: Do you support the government’s participation in a COVID-19 contact tracing app?
Sample percentage 40
30
20
10
0
Yes Only if voluntary No
Figure 2: Do you support the government’s participation in a COVID-19 contact tracing app?
(a) Correspondence with Senate study (b) Correspondence with Mainstreet Research poll
85% 62.4%
Sample percentage
Sample percentage
40 40
20 20
0 0
Yes Only if voluntary No Yes Only if voluntary No
3Our results may explain some the previously mentioned differences between the Senate and the Mainstreet
Research surveys (Figures 1-2). A majority of sample respondents (85%) answered either yes or a conditional yes
to the survey question. This matches the widespread support observed in the Senate study. Overall, Canadians
appear relatively favorable to the idea of a contact tracing app. On the other hand, a majority of the sample (62.4%)
either disapprove of the government’s participation in a COVID-19 app or think the technology should be used only
on a voluntary basis. This is consistent with the Mainstreet Research survey, where a majority of respondents were
opposed to mandatory contact tracing apps. This last conclusion differs from the Senate study, which suggests that
the way the issue is presented to the public may influence responses, among other factors.
Figure 3: Impact of Question Wording
50
40
Sample percentage
30 Question wording
Baseline
Contact from Health Authorities
20 Privacy vs Economy
10
0
Yes Only if voluntary No
Finally, we also relied on an experimental treatment that randomly assigned two alternative variations of the
question above to respondents (Figure 3). The second version added the following sentence to the question
preamble: “In most cases, COVID-19 apps are designed to notify health agencies when someone was in contact
with an infected individual.” This sentence captures an important design choice, as it highlights that health authorities
would have the power to get in touch with individuals at risk and impose testing or self-isolation on them. Again,
this is the intended use for most apps (e.g. ABTraceTogether and the Apple-Google app), with the exception of the
COVI app. Using this wording, unconditional support for contact tracing drops by three percentage points. This may
suggest that public opinion is more favourable to MILA’s approach, although the difference in our sample is not
statistically significant. The third variant of the survey question primes both sides of a real-life debate surrounding
COVID-19 apps, the risks for privacy against the economic and health benefits.2 Using this last framing had a
minimal influence on the distribution of responses.
2 The added sentences read “Some people claim that COVID-19 apps may pose a risk to fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy.
Others claim these apps are needed to help reopen the economy while protecting public health.”
4Implications
These findings have policy implications. While Canadians seem relatively open to the idea of cell phone contact
tracing, the sample proportions observed in this survey suggest that imposing the use of a COVID-19 app would
be divisive. Caveats should be kept in mind when estimating population proportions using online surveys (see the
methodological discussion below), but the divergent results across studies on mandatory COVID-19 apps indicate
that responses may be affected by survey design. The full project associated with the data is meant to look at
the factors that influence public opinion on cell phone contact tracing and other containment measures. Findings
from our forthcoming study will help to identify what makes Canadians more or less likely to support the use of
technologies like cell phone contact tracing.
Methodology
The internet survey responses were collected using quota sampling—that is, by relying on target numbers matching
the expected census distributions for age, gender, and region. Respondents from the territories were not included
in the survey. The protocol was approved by the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board [Protocol number
39375].
Opt-in, online surveys have become increasingly common for academic research with the decline in reliability of
the previous gold standard in public opinion research (random digit dialing). Previous research has documented
that sample average treatment effects (the average impact of a randomized treatment, based on the sample) are
reliable quantities for inference (Miratrix et al., 2018; Coppock and McClellan, 2019). However, readers should be
wary of inferences about population quantities, such as the percentage of the population supporting a given option.
All sample proportions reported in this note were replicated using raking weights (iterative proportional fitting) for
interlocking quotas on age group by gender, by province. The weighted results are within one percentage point of
those reported in this paper.
5References
Alberta. 2020. ABTraceTogether. Government of Alberta. https://www.alberta.ca/ab-trace-together.aspx. Page
consulted on May 28, 2020.
Apple/Google. 2020. Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing. Apple and Google.
https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing. Page consulted on May 28, 2020.
A. Coppock and O. A. McClellan. 2019. “Validating the Demographic, Political, Psychological, and Experimental
Results Obtained from a New Source of Online Survey Respondents.” Research & Politics, January–March:
doi.org/10.1177/2053168018822174.
K. McKenna. 2020. “Testing the Public’s Trust: Quebec Premier Mulls Adopting Contact-Tracing App.” CBC News,
May 19.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-premier-considers-covi-contact-tracing-app-1.5576122.
Page consulted on June 1, 2020.
L. W. Miratrix, J. S. Sekhon, A. G. Theodoridis, and L. F. Campos. 2018. “Worth Weighting? How to Think About
and Use Weights in Survey Experiments.” Political Analysis, 26(3): 275–291.
R. Moodie, D. Dasko, C. Deacon, P. Loewen, and D. T. Fraser. 2020. Canadian Public Support for the Use of Mobile
Phone Data to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic. May 7, 2020.
P. H. O’Neill, T. Ryan-Mosley, and B. Johnson. “A Flood of Coronavirus Apps Are Tracking Us. Now it’s Time to
Keep Track of Them.” MIT Technology Review, May 2020.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/07/1000961/launching-mittr-covid-tracing-tracker/.
Mainstreet Research. “Survey of Canada.” Canada iPolitics, May 11, 2020.
https://ipolitics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Canada-iPolitics-11May2020.pdf.
S. Woodhams. “COVID-19 Digital Rights Tracker.” Top10VPN, May 12, 2020.
https://www.top10vpn.com/research/investigations/covid-19-digital-rights-tracker/. Page consulted on May 28,
2020.
6You can also read
