What's next for COVID-19 apps? Governance and oversight

Science   Article 

Studies conducted in April and May 2020 showed that in countries like the United States, Switzerland, and Italy, between 55 and 70% of adults in all age groups were willing to download a contact tracing app (5).

Yet these figures do not match the current DCT apps uptake. Even in countries with robust privacy safeguards in place, downloads of DCT apps have been below expectations. At the time of writing, the Australian DCT app has been downloaded by 6.5 million (26% of the population), the Italian one by 8 million (13.4%), and the newly released French one by 1.5 million (2.3%). Ireland has about 1.3 million active app users (24%), Switzerland 1.8 million (21.5%), and Germany 16 million (19.3%).

As people keep downloading the app, at some point, the desirable number of users may be reached. Decades of research in science and technology studies confirm that such a bell-shaped innovation diffusion pattern is not particularly surprising, as technological uptake does not just rapidly happen by virtue of a technology's presumed usefulness (technological determinism), but owes instead to complex cycles of cultural and political adaptation (social construction of technology) (6).   ....