Social Licensing of Privacy-Encroaching Policies to Address COVID-19

In May 2020 CELAB joined the research efforts that aim to provide a sound, facts-based understanding of the public perceptions and attitudes related to various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its personal and societal ramifications. The project our team has joined was initiated and designed by Professors Stephan Lewandowsky and Simon Dennis. The project involves a longitudinal cross-cultural study to trace people’s attitudes towards different tracking-based policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. CELAB team, headed by Professor Judit Sándor, used the original online survey instrument and complemented this with several new questions with the aim to map the local, country specificities related to the topic. The main goal was to collect data for understanding the expectations of the community, beyond mere compliance with legal requirements, of hypothetical governmental use of location tracking technologies to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. The aim of this project is to understand people’s real opinions and judgements of the circumstances under which it may be acceptable for governments to use location tracking technologies to address COVID-19.