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. The findings of the study contributed to the formulation of useful recommendations communicated to the relevant Irish actors.
ARES 2021: The 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, Proceedings.
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ISBN 978-1-4503-9051
Science Foundation Ireland through COVID RapidResponseprogrammegrantnumber20/COV/0229andthrough the grant 13/RC/2094 co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern and Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero- the Irish
ID Code:
27573
Deposited On:
16 Aug 2022 16:04 by
Thomas Murtagh
. Last Modified 16 Aug 2022 16:04