How optimistic do citizens feel about digital contact tracing? – Perspectives from developing countries Praveen S.V. and Rajesh Ittamalla National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli, Tiruchirappalli, India, and Dhilip Subramanian Master of Analytics, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand Abstract Purpose – Despite numerous positive aspects of digital contact tracing, the implied nature of contact tracing is still viewed with skepticism. Those in favor of contact tracing often undermine various risks involved with it, while those against it often undermine its positive benefits. However, unless the government and the app makers can convince a significant section of the population to use digital contact apps, desired results cannot be achieved. This study aims to focus on analyzing the perception of citizens belonging to developing countries about digital contact tracing. Design/methodology/approach – For this study, data were collected from Twitter. Tweets containing hashtag and the word “contact tracing” were crawled using Python library Tweepy. Tweets across the top five developing countries (India, Brazil, South Africa, Argentina and Columbia) with high COVID-19 cases were collected for this study. After eliminating tweets of other languages, we selected 50,000 unique English tweets for this study. Using the machine learning algorithm, we have detected the sentiment of all the tweets belonging to each country. Structural topic modeling was performed for the tweets to understand the concerns shared by citizens of the developing countries about digital contact tracing. Findings – The study was conducted in two parts. Study 1 results show that Indians and Brazilians citizens record more negative sentiments toward “digital contact tracing” than other major developing countries. Surprisingly, the citizens of India and Brazil also records more positive sentiments about contact tracing. This shows the polarized nature of the population of both countries while dealing with digital contact tracing. Overall, only 33.3% of total tweets were positively related to contact tracing, while 53.7% of the total tweets were neutral. Study 2 results show that factors such as the reliability of the contact tracing apps, contact tracing may lead to unnecessary panic, invasion of privacy and data misuse as the prominent reasons why the citizens of the five countries feel pessimistic about contact tracing. Originality/value – After the COVID-19 strikes, numerous studies were conducted to analyze and suggest the best possible way of implementing digital contact tracing to curb COVID. However, only a handful of studies were conducted examining how the general public perceives the concept of digital contact tracing, especially pertaining to developing countries. This study fills that gap. Keywords Natural language processing, Python, COVID crises, R, Structural topic modeling Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction Even though we are just two months away from 2021, there are no signs of the COVID-19 crises decline. Many countries, especially developing countries, still record several thousands of COVID-19 cases every day. Many experts cautioned the world governments that COVID-19 is far from over, and it may even be there for another two years Digital contact tracing Received 11 October 2020 Revised 11 October 2020 Accepted 11 October 2020 International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications © Emerald Publishing Limited 1742-7371 DOI 10.1108/IJPCC-10-2020-0166 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1742-7371.htm