Privacy in a Public Health Emergency: An Analysis of Shifting Data Privacy Preferences during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Prior pandemic-era privacy studies have asked research subject for their willingness to share (WTS) health and location data with contact-tracing applications. However, no contemporary studies have surveyed for changes in WTS across other types of data attributes from the pre- to during-COVID window. Through hypothesis testing, regressions, and qualitative coding of responses from a survey administered to a randomly selected pool of 500 respondents about their WTS data attributes before and during COVID-19, I find that WTS most data attributes has generally decreased during the pandemic, excepting willingness to share health and location information with government data-collecting bodies, which has increased. Qualitative responses suggest that this exception might be due to an increased amount of time spent online as well as a heightened sense of moral obligation to share data for the public good. Privacy preferences are also found to vary with political party affiliation, highlighting emergent research axes for privacy theory. These results inform privacy policymaking in the pandemic era. Policymakers should implement a comprehensive national privacy policy, COVID-era policy that specially protects users from private industry threats, and update protected data classes to match users’ quickly changing preferences