Just Plain Dumb?: How Digital Contact Tracing Apps Could’ve Worked Better (And Why They Never Got the Chance)

This essay describes how the privacy debate that emerged over digital contact tracing and Google’s and Apple’s decisions to strictly limit apps permitted to use their platforms resulted in undercutting their potential usefulness as a tool to combat the pandemic while still failing to engender trust in these tools as intended

Portuguese Validation of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology Scale (UTAUT) to a COVID-19 mobile application: a pilot study

The use of technology has proven to be a powerful tool in the fight against COVID-19 and its variants of concern (Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Delta, and Omicron). The urgency of responding to this worldwide pandemic has accelerated the development of monitoring systems and contact tracing applications. Without technology's contribution, the adverse effects on humanity economically, socially, and psychologically would be even more devastating. This study aimed to translate, adapt, and validate the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model in a Portuguese university population, to evaluate adherence to a mobile application for tracking COVID-19. An observational cross-sectional study was developed using a sample with 1081 participants (71% female, 59.2% with ages between 16 and 24, and 78.2% of the respondents university students). The Portuguese version model showed good reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.82) and an acceptable overall adjustment to the sample under study (χ2/df = 3.732, CFI = 0.955, TLI = 0.944, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.06); however, this model could be improved, as we proved. Since this is a pilot study, more studies are needed. The results indicated that the P-UTAUT can be improved for evaluating adherence to a COVID-19 mobile application.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digital Surveillance, Civil Society and the Media during the Covid-19 Pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, so did many digital technologies promising to improve the public health response. These technologies raised various concerns for civil liberties in the digital age, from infringing on privacy to institutionalizing mass surveillance capacities. This media monitoring projects explores how English-language news organizations worldwide reported on these digital surveillance initiatives over the period of a year. By analyzing news framing, it provides insights into the contours of public debates on digitally driven public health surveillance. The report sheds light on the evolution of coverage over time, its geographic distribution, whose voices were included and excluded from these debates, and the prevalence of mis/dis-information. It also highlights the place of civil society in these narratives; which civil society organizations appeared most often in the media; what roles they played vis-à-vis digital surveillance; and the racial and gender make up of civil society voices appearing in news coverage. It provides a set of recommendations and resources for civil society groups and journalists working on the intersection of civil liberties, public health, and digital technologies

A detailed review of blockchain-based applications for protection against pandemic like COVID-19

The recent corona virus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has brought the issues of technological deficiencies and challenges of security and privacy, validating and maintaining anonymity, user control over records while fully utilizing the available records etc., that can be encountered in an emergency or pandemic condition. Blockchain technology has evolved as a promising solution in conditions that necessitate immutability, record integrity, and proper records authentication. Blockchain can effectively resolve the technical barriers and effectively utilize the available resources and infrastructure in pandemic situations like the current COVID-19. This paper provides an extensive review of various possible use cases of blockchain and available solutions for protection against the COVID-19 like situation. It gives an insight into the benefits and shortcomings of available solutions. It further provides the issues and challenges of adopting blockchain in a situation like COVID-19 and suggest future directions that can offer a platform for further improved and better solutions