An Examination of People’s Privacy Concerns, Perceptions of Social Benefits, and Acceptance of Covid-19 Mitigation Measures That Harness Location Information

A Comparative Study of the U.S. and South Korea

Bibliographic Data

ID22034608
AuthorsJunghwan Kim (0000-0002-7275-769X, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Mei-Po Kwan (0000-0001-8602-9258, Chinese University of Hong Kong, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume10
Issue1
Pages25
Publication date2021-01-12
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2220-9964 • E-ISSN: 2220-9964
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/ijgi10010025
OpenAlexW3120308979
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited42

This paper examines people’s privacy concerns, perceptions of social benefits, and acceptance of various COVID-19 control measures that harness location information using data collected through an online survey in the U.S. and South Korea. The results indicate that people have higher privacy concerns for methods that use more sensitive and private information. The results also reveal that people’s perceptions of social benefits are low when their privacy concerns are high, indicating a trade-off relationship between privacy concerns and perceived social benefits. Moreover, the acceptance by South Koreans for most mitigation methods is significantly higher than that by people in the U.S. Lastly, the regression results indicate that South Koreans (compared to people in the U.S.) and people with a stronger collectivist orientation tend to have higher acceptance for the control measures because they have lower privacy concerns and perceive greater social benefits for the measures. These findings advance our understanding of the important role of geographic context and culture as well as people’s experiences of the mitigation measures applied to control a previous pandemic

Business · Collectivism · Economics · Geography · Information privacy · Internet privacy · Pandemic · Perception · Political science · Social acceptance · COVID-19 and Mental Health · COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing · Medicine · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Social Psychology

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