  During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have developed and deployed
contact tracing technologies to curb the spread of the disease by locating and
isolating people who have been in contact with coronavirus carriers.
Subsequently, understanding why people install and use contact tracing apps is
becoming central to their effectiveness and impact. This paper analyzes
situations where centralized mass surveillance technologies are deployed
simultaneously with a voluntary contact tracing mobile app. We use this
parallel deployment as a natural experiment that tests how attitudes toward
mass deployments affect people's installation of the contact tracing app. Based
on a representative survey of Israelis (n=519), our findings show that positive
attitudes toward mass surveillance were related to a reduced likelihood of
installing contact tracing apps and an increased likelihood of uninstalling
them. These results also hold when controlling for privacy concerns about the
contact tracing app, attitudes toward the app, trust in authorities, and
demographic properties. Similar reasoning may also be relevant for crowding out
voluntary participation in data collection systems.
