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Background Digital surveillance tools and health informatics show promise in counteracting diseases but have limited uptake. A notable illustration of the limits of such tools is the general failure of digital contact tracing in the United States in response to COVID-19. Objective We investigated the associations between individual characteristics and the willingness to use app-based contact tracing in Detroit, a majority-minority city that experienced multiple waves of COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths since the start of the pandemic. The aim of this study was to examine variations among residents in the willingness to download a contact tracing app on their phones to provide public health officials with information about close COVID-19 contact during summer 2020. Methods To examine residents’ willingness to participate in digital contact tracing, we analyzed data from 2 waves of the Detroit Metro Area Communities Study, a population-based survey of Detroit, Michigan residents. The data captured 1873 responses from 991 Detroit residents collected in June and July 2020. We estimated a series of multilevel logit models to gain insights into differences in the willingness to participate in digital contact tracing across a variety of individual attributes, including race/ethnicity, degree of trust in the government, and level of education, as well as interactions among these variables. Results Our results reflected widespread reluctance to participate in digital contact tracing in response to COVID-19, as less than half (826/1873, 44.1%) of the respondents said they would be willing to participate in app-based contact tracing. Compared to White respondents, Black (odds ratio [OR] 0.45, 95% CI 0.23-0.86) and Latino (OR 0.32, 95% CI 0.11-0.99) respondents were significantly less willing to participate in digital contact tracing. Trust in the government was positively associated with the willingness to participate in digital contact tracing (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.07-1.27), but this effect was the strongest for White residents (OR 2.14, 95% CI 1.55-2.93). We found similarly divergent patterns of the effects of education by race. While there were no significant differences among noncollege-educated residents, White college-educated residents showed greater willingness to use app-based contact tracing (OR 6.12, 95% CI 1.86-20.15) and Black college-educated residents showed less willingness (OR 0.46, 95% CI 0.26-0.81). Conclusions Trust in the government and education contribute to Detroit residents’ wariness of digital contact tracing, reflecting concerns about surveillance that cut across race but likely arise from different sources. These findings point to the importance of a culturally informed understanding of health hesitancy for future efforts hoping to leverage digital contact tracing. Though contact tracing technologies have the potential to advance public health, unequal uptake may exacerbate disparate impacts of health crises.
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Disentangling Perceptions of Offensiveness: Cultural and Moral Correlates
In Detroit, the largest Black-majority city in the United States, municipal authorities have deployed an array of surveillance technologies with the promise of containing crime and improving community safety. This article draws from a cross-sectional survey of over two thousand Detroit residents and multi-year community-based fieldwork in Detroit’s Eastside to examine local perceptions of policing surveillance technologies. Our survey reveals that respondents, notably those in more vulnerable positions, report higher perceived safety levels with policing surveillance cameras in their neighborhoods. However, when triangulating these results with insights from our fieldwork, we argue that these survey findings should not be taken as public support for surveillance. Alongside this seeming buy-in is a widely shared “better than nothing” imaginary among residents from impacted communities. “Better than nothing,” for the residents, is a pragmatic compromise and maneuver between being aware of the inherent flaws of surveillance technologies and settling for any available resource or hope. This notion of “better than nothing” unveils residents’ prolonged wait for digital justice and institutional accountability, which we show is where racialized infrastructural harm and exploitation are enacted along the temporal dimension. Our findings offer practical insights for counter-surveillance advocacy efforts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2121723
- PAR ID:
- 10538665
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400704505
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2022 to 2032
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Rio de Janeiro Brazil
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3659022
