Digital Literacy and Awareness of User Location Privacy: What People in Turkey Know About Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports?

At the outbreak of the COVID-19, governments, health organizations and large technology companies were not prepared for the measures to be taken against the disease. Contact tracking was widely carried out using location data to prevent the spread of COVID-19 with the use of technological tools, especially smartphones. In this epidemic, economic difficulties also emerged due to the lockdown imposed by the governments. For this reason, social distancing and contact tracing applications have become widespread in order to prevent the disease as soon as possible. Such strategies negatively affected individuals’ perceptions of privacy, because authorities gave priority to collecting data from individuals in order to prevent the epidemic. On the other hand, non-governmental organizations suggested that “privacy-first” and “decentralized” approaches should be preferred instead of “data-first” and “centralized” approaches. In this direction, Google and Apple companies have developed a decentralized common API to help fight the virus, which also complies with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. And in particular, Google has regularly shared Google Community Mobility Reports (GCMR) publicly by anonymizing the data it collects from Google Maps. Using these reports people and authorities can get movement data about different categories of places such as retail and recreation, supermarkets and pharmacies, parks, public transport, workplaces and residential.Our aim is to find out whether individuals in Turkey are aware that their location and movement data are being tracked by Google Maps and contact tracing apps for preventing the spread of COVID-19. We also examined their motivations for downloading location tracing apps and whether they have been taking necessary steps to protect their privacy. We investigated whether they had concerns about the possible future use of contact tracing data collected by the health authorities in Turkey and other institutions like Google. The scope of the study covers smartphone users. We collected data through an online survey using Google Forms. Our survey consists mostly of narrative questions, where we asked respondents to imagine various scenarios where app manufacturers, mobile phone operators/manufacturers, or the government were using some of their data to study or mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Then, between 12.15.2020/01.02.2021 we distributed the survey link to the participants through various social media networks. We reported the results of the data of 444 people collected anonymously by quantitative analysis methods. As a result of the study, it was determined that the digital literacy levels of the individuals are high due to their high education level. Despite this, it has been revealed that the participants do not read the terms and conditions offered in apps. Individuals who care about privacy expressed their willingness to share their data for the sake of public health. As an answer to the main question of our study, it was concluded that the participants’ knowledge of GCMR was insufficient. As a matter of fact, it was understood that individuals were indecisive and worried about the use of their data by the authorities in the future due to the uncertainty experienced during the pandemic period.