# A Lesson for the Future: Will You Let Me Violate Your Privacy to Save Your Life?
## 1 Introduction  
COVID-19 hit Canada in Toronto on 25 January 2020, and it continued to spread and claim many lives. To slow down the spread of the virus, the Canadian government implemented several measures, such as mask mandates, social distancing, shields, limits on gatherings, COVID screening, and vaccinations. These measures were mandatory for businesses and citizens to follow. However, the personal usage of CTAs was optional. In other words, Canada's approach to CTAs allowed for the decision to be left up to its citizens on whether to download the application. While only 16% of Canadians installed Canada's national CTA, COVID Alert [1], studies show adoption rates of at least 60% For CTAs to be effective [2]. If only a minority downloads the application, positive COVID-19 cases can be missed, and other people within the vicinity during the same time window cannot be traced, which makes the app ineffective. As a result, CTAs were never effective as expected in Canada. It was not because of technical issues or poor development practices, but privacy concerns discouraged individuals from utilizing these technologies. These concerns became more pervasive whenmany security experts raised security and privacy concerns over CTAs in May 2020 [3]. As this was the case in Canada and mostly in Western countries, a few other countries made it mandatory for citizens to download a CTA on their smartphones to track their geolocation and notify them when a positive case of COVID-19 is reported in their vicinity recently. Although this would violate the citizens' rights to privacy, this approach would allow the health authorities to effectively monitor the spread and containment of the virus. For example, in South Korea, downloading the CTA was mandatory. Due to this and other forceful measures, the country has seen significantly fewer cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 than Canada. This comparison between the outcomes of COVID-19 in Canada and South Korea becomes much more staggering when we consider that South Korea has around 14 million more people (\(\sim\)35%) and a population density of 527 people per km\({}^{2}\) compared to Canada's four people per km\({}^{2}\). It then comes to the question that, if Canada made CTAs mandatory, would the cases and deaths have been similar to those of South Korea? Additionally, if citizens of Canada were aware of the positive influences that a CTA could introduce, would they have downloaded it to their smartphone and contributed to their country's safety? To answer these questions, we surveyed the citizens of Canada to determine whether the lack of CTA participants was due to a lack of information. We conducted a study that focused on three main questions: what is your current knowledge of CTAs? Did you know that their implementation has effectively saved many lives in South Korea? Knowing this, would you use a CTA in a future pandemic? Moreover, we acquired the participants' demographic information and concerns during the pandemic (no questions regarding personal losses or infections from COVID-19). Following the initial questions, we gathered the participants' general experience with the pandemic. This involved if they were concerned for their wellbeing and the government's handling of the situation. Additionally, we asked whether the participants had received at least one vaccination. This section determined any correlation between participants' experience with the pandemic and their stance on CTAs. We then gathered the participants' knowledge of CTAs. This focused on whether they were aware of their existence, specific applications they had heard of, and if they downloaded any. It is possible that, if the participant had not heard of CTAs or their usefulness, they would less likely be willing to participate. The next set of questions gathered the participants' opinions of CTAs.