Irish attitudes toward COVID tracker app & privacy: sentiment analysis on Twitter and survey data
Lohar, Pintu, Xie, Guodong, Bendechache, Malika, Brennan, Rob, Celeste, Edoardo, Trestian, Ramona 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3315-3081 and Tal, Irina
(2021)
Irish attitudes toward COVID tracker app & privacy: sentiment analysis on Twitter and survey data.
ARES 2021: The 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security.
In: 16th International Workshop on Frontiers in Availability, Reliability and Security (FARES 2021) to be held in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2021), 17-20 Aug 2021, All-Digital Conference.
ISBN 9781450390514.
[Conference or Workshop Item]
(doi:10.1145/3465481.3469193)
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Abstract
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.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Research Areas: | A. > School of Science and Technology > Design Engineering and Mathematics |
| Item ID: | 33445 |
| Notes on copyright: | © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
Published version: The definitive Version of Record was published in ARES 2021: The 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3465481.3469193. The published work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License. Final accepted version: This is the author's version of the work. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. |
| Useful Links: | |
| Depositing User: | Ramona Trestian |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jul 2021 14:01 |
| Last Modified: | 27 Feb 2023 04:38 |
| URI: | https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/id/eprint/33445 |
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