Majority of Irish adults willing to use contact tracing app, says study

More than eight out of ten Irish adults say they are willing to use a contact tracing app on their phones to curb the spread of the coronavirus, new research has found.

It emerged on Wednesday that the HSE’s contact tracing app was now ready for deployment but no date has been set for its release.

Nearly 60 per cent of respondents to the survey said they were concerned about privacy issues, surveillance by technology companies or the government or the risk of hacking.

More than 8,000 people took part in the Covid-19 digital contact tracing online national survey last month which was designed by researchers from Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, the University of Limerick (UL) and the National University of Galway.

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Nearly all participants said they understood the importance of informing the HSE about their close contacts should they contract the virus, while more than half said they “definitely will install” the app when it becomes available.

Nearly a third of participants said they “probably” would install the app while ten per cent said they “may or may not” install it.

People preferred the idea of a Bluetooth app with 31 per cent saying they would like an app that uses geo-location technology.

Some 41 per cent of respondents said they could see no reason not to install the app.

However, the remaining 59 per cent expressed a number of concerns including worries that technology companies would use their details for greater surveillance after the pandemic; that the government would abuse the system for surveillance purposes and that people’s phones would be more likely to get hacked.

Dr Michael O’Callaghan from UL’s school of medicine and one of the authors of the report said information should be “communicated widely” on when the app would be wound down and how Bluetooth would allow information to be exchanged between phones.

Professor Liam Glynn, also from UL’s school of medicine, said downloading the app and actually using it were two separate challenges and that the public should be kept informed as to whether the app was actually helping with contact tracing efforts.

He said experience from other countries showed that intent to download did not always translate into actually downloading and using the app.

“Allowing the general public to see in real-time the public health benefits of this app may help maintain public interest,” he said.

Dr Jim Buckley from Lero said studies in other countries had found people’s actual use of the app usually lagged behind the take-up-rate suggested by surveys.

However, he added that the overall response from participants in the Irish survey was heartening given that research from the University of Oxford estimates if 56 per cent of people in the UK downloaded a contact tracing app, it would be enough to control the disease.