How well a product works has always been a key to its success—or failure. There is no shortage of tech products that have, despite their buildup, eventually lost consumers because they failed to work as well as expected. There was Apple’s Newton, the Samsung Galaxy Fold more recently, and let’s not forget Juicero, a juicer that didn’t actually do anything more than give a bag of pre-processed juice a squeeze.
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Elissa M. Redmiles is a researcher at Microsoft Research and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Gabriel Kaptuck is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting fellow at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. Eszter Hargittai is a professor and holds the chair in Internet Use and Society in the Communication and Media Studies Department at the University of Zurich. She is the editor of Research Exposed from Columbia University Press.
Then there are the products that function, but have frequent errors, and though they remain in the market, they gain a reputation for failing to meet consumer expectations. You’d be hard pressed to find a 2012 smartphone user who would feel comfortable turning to Apple Maps for directions, even all these years later. Similarly, if you Google search “Roomba,” the first question about the self-navigating vacuum is: “Does the Roomba vacuum work?” Inaccuracies in the navigation algorithm of the Roomba have led to self-help articles on how to get the vacuums working, lower than projected sales and market penetration, and most recently, competing products whose main selling point is improved accuracy. Consumers don’t like things that don’t work as advertised. And once trust in a product is lost, it’s not easily won back.
Yet, despite decades of evidence pointing to the importance of accuracy in the success of new technologies, the debate about coronavirus contact-tracing apps and whether people will adopt them has thus far centered on privacy risks. While privacy is undoubtedly an important element to consider, the singular focus on it has left a significant blind spot: how well will these apps work, and how might accuracy problems impact adoption? Early evidence shows that even if contact-tracing apps use state-of-the-art privacy protections, accuracy concerns may send users fleeing.
Covid-19 contact-tracing apps, one of the most debated technologies currently under development, are designed to detect when people have been exposed to coronavirus using an individual’s location data, or by communicating directly with nearby phones. These apps can help users make informed decisions about when to self-isolate and get tested for the virus. But, these apps can only
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