Contact tracing apps used in tracing and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 have sparked discussions and controversies
worldwide. The major concerns in relation to these apps are around privacy. Ireland was in general praised for the design of
its COVID tracker app, and the transparency through which privacy issues were addressed. However, the "voice" of the Irish
public was not really heard or analysed. This study aimed to analyse the Irish public sentiment towards privacy and COVID
tracker app. For this purpose we have conducted sentiment analysis on Twitter data collected from public Twitter accounts
from Republic of Ireland. We collected COVID-19 related tweets generated in Ireland over a period of time from January
1, 2020 up to December 31, 2020 in order to perform sentiment analysis on this data set. Moreover, the study performed
sentiment analysis on the feedback received from a national survey on privacy conducted in Republic of Ireland. The findings
of the study reveal a significant criticism towards the app that relate to privacy concerns, but other aspects of the app as well.
The findings also reveal some positive attitude towards the fight against COVID-19, but these are not necessarily related to
the technological solutions employed for this purpose.
Science Foundation Ireland grant number 20/COV/0229 and 13/RC/2094, European Regional Development Fund through the Southern and Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie) and the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology (www.adaptcentre.ie) [grant number 13/RC/21
ID Code:
26009
Deposited On:
12 Aug 2021 15:22 by
Vidatum Academic
. Last Modified 19 Sep 2023 08:48