Privacy Policies Of Contact Tracing Apps:A Semantic Network Analysis

Since the outbreak of Covid-19,many countries have launched applications for contact tracing.The policymakers emphasize relevant privacy protection laws in the privacy policy and consider national culture to alleviate people’s concerns about privacy when formulating policies.It is vital for government organizations and enterprises to declare the compliance with relevant laws and to meet the psychological needs of users based on their cultural characteristics.According to Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions theory,the US and German cultures are more individualistic,while Singapore and India are collectivist cultures.With Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions and semantic network analysis as the theoretical framework,this thesis analyzes the privacy policies of the four countries’ digital contact tracing apps.The study found that the topics of the privacy policies differ.The US’ privacy policy tends to focus on usage.Its users have the most direct control over personal information.Its individualistic characteristics are mainly reflected in independence,goals,and direct communication.Germany introduces the application and privacy protection at the technical level.It clearly states that the information ownership and control rights belong to the user.The individualistic characteristic of Germany lies in the protection of personal information.Singapore’s policy emphasizes how personal information functions in the application.It is challenging to infer the extent to which users control personal information through its semantic network.The ambiguity of its content and the application’s name reflect the characteristics of harmony and group orientation.The semantic network constructed by the Indian text mainly introduces the application’s actions and explains the usage by scenarios.Its collectivism characteristic presents situational dependence,group orientation,and hierarchical systems.These characteristics are consistent with the cultural characteristics of individualism and collectivism.The quantitative analysis of cosine similarity found that the textual similarity between the US and Germany is the highest,while the privacy policies of Singapore and India are the most similar.It indicates that privacy policies are related to the dimension of individualism and collectivism.