People's privacy sentiments drive changes in legislation and may influence their willingness to use a variety of technologies. While single-point-in-time investigations of privacy sentiment offer useful insight, longitudinal study of people's privacy sentiments is necessary to better understand and anticipate evolving privacy attitudes. In this work, we use longitudinal survey data (n=6,676) to model Americans' sentiments toward collection and use of data for government-and healthrelated purposes in 2019, 2020 and 2021. After the onset of COVID-19, we observe significant changes in Americans' privacy sentiments toward government-and healthrelated data uses and find that Americans' privacy attitudes largely converged on these topics. We observe additional changes in the context of other national events such as the U.S. presidential elections and Black Lives Matter protests. Our results offer insight into how privacy attitudes may have been impacted by recent events, and these results allow us to identify potential predictors of changes in privacy attitudes during times of geopolitical (e.g., global pandemic) or national (e.g., political elections, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement) change.

People’s privacy sentiments influence changes in legislation as well as technology design and use. While single-point-in-time investigations of privacy sentiment offer useful insight, study of people’s privacy sentiments over time is also necessary to better understand and anticipate evolving privacy attitudes. In this work, we build off of a 2019 Pew Research study and use repeated cross-sectional surveys (n=6,676) from 2019, 2020, and 2021 to model the sentiments of people in the U.S. toward collection and use of data for government- and health-related purposes. After the onset of COVID-19, we observe significant decreases in respondent acceptance of government data use and significant increases in acceptance of health-related data uses. While differences in privacy attitudes between sociodemographic groups largely decreased over this time period, following the 2020 U.S. national elections, we observe some of the first evidence that privacy sentiments may change based on the alignment between a user’s politics and the political party in power. Our results offer insight into how privacy attitudes may have been impacted by recent events and allow us to identify potential predictors of changes in privacy attitudes during times of geopolitical or national change.