A Privacy Paradox? Impact of Privacy Concerns on Willingness to Disclose COVID-19 Health Status in the United States Kirsten Chapman Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, USA Melanie Klimes Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, USA Braden Wellman Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, USA Garrett Smith Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, USA Mainack Mondal Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Kharagpur, India Staci Smith Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, USA Yunan Chen University of California, Irvine Irvine, California, USA Haijing Hao Bentley University Waltham, Massachusetts, USA Xinru Page Brigham Young University Provo, Utah, USA ABSTRACT Privacy concerns around sharing personal health information are frequently cited as hindering COVID-19 contact tracing app adop- tion. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 304 adults in the United States to investigate their attitudes towards shar- ing two types of COVID-19 health status (COVID-19 Diagnosis, Exposure to COVID-19) with three diferent audiences (Anyone, Frequent Contacts, Occasional Contacts). Using the Internet User’s Information Privacy Concern (IUIPC) scale, we were able to identify the efect of diferent types of privacy concerns on sharing this in- formation with various audiences. We found that privacy concerns around data Collection predicted lower willingness to share either type of health status to all of these audiences. However, desire for Control and for Awareness of data practices increased willingness to share health information with certain audiences. We discuss the implications of our fndings. CCS CONCEPTS · Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy; Social aspects of security and privacy. KEYWORDS Privacy Pardox; IUIPC; Information Disclosure; COVID-19 ACM Reference Format: Kirsten Chapman, Melanie Klimes, Braden Wellman, Garrett Smith, Mainack Mondal, Staci Smith, Yunan Chen, Haijing Hao, and Xinru Page. 2022. A Privacy Paradox? Impact of Privacy Concerns on Willingness to Disclose COVID-19 Health Status in the United States. In Companion Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW’22 Companion), November 8–22, 2022, Virtual Event, Taiwan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3500868.3559471 Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CSCW’22 Companion, November 8–22, 2022, Virtual Event, Taiwan © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9190-0/22/11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3500868.3559471 1 INTRODUCTION According to the World Health Organization, łwhen systematically applied, contact-tracing will break the chains of transmission of an infectious disease and is thus an essential public health toolž [11]. However, privacy concerns have acted as a hindrance for con- tact tracing app adoption. Altmann et al. found that "privacy and security seem to be an important impediment to the adoption of the app, particularly in Germany and the United States" [1]. Thus, understanding how people’s privacy concerns afect the usage of these apps is paramount. Further studies have also shown the neg- ative efects which privacy concerns can have on willingness to share COVID-19 related information. One such study found that individuals were unwilling to share their diagnosis because of the potential workplace discrimination they would face [7]. Conse- quently, understanding the relationship between privacy concerns and willingness to share is important in developing these apps. On the other hand, some research suggests that stated privacy concerns do not necessarily impact adoption [9]. When expressed privacy concerns are contrary to an individual’s actions, it is known as a privacy paradox [16]. Given these contradictory results from prior research, there may be multiple factors at play. A nuanced understanding of people’s attitudes and behaviors is needed to unpack any potential privacy paradox. Thus our research investigates whether privacy concerns actu- ally do efect people’s willingness to share certain types of COVID- 19 health status data. We also recognize that willingness to share may vary based on the audience. Thus our research question is: How do privacy concerns afect willingness to share COVID- 19 health-related status with diferent audiences? We conducted a nationally representative survey study (N=304) in the United States about COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors. We chose to initially focus on the U.S. as it is a highly individualistic country where privacy is heavily debated. This work draws on a subset of the survey questions to answer our research question. We use Malholtra et al.’s IUIPC subscales [10] to measure respondents’ privacy concerns. We also measured their willingness to share if they were Diagnosed with COVID-19 (Diagnosis) or Exposed to COVID-19 (Exposure) with people of varying degrees of regular contact (Frequent, Occasional, Anyone). 159