The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the development of smartphone applications to assist disease management. Many "corona apps" require widespread adoption to be efective, which has sparked public debates about the privacy, security, and societal implications of government-backed health applications. We conducted a representative online study in Germany (n = 1003), the US (n = 1003), and China (n = 1019) to investigate user acceptance of corona apps, using a vignette design based on the contextual integrity framework. We explored apps for contact tracing, symptom checks, quarantine enforcement, health certifcates, and mere information. Our results provide insights into data processing practices that foster adoption and reveal signifcant diferences between countries, with user acceptance being highest in China and lowest in the US. Chinese participants prefer the collection of personalized data, while German and US participants favor anonymity. Across countries, contact tracing is viewed more positively than quarantine enforcement, and technical malfunctions negatively impact user acceptance. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; Domain-specifc security and privacy architectures; • Humancentered computing → Empirical studies in HCI .

Abstract-Contemporary mobile messaging provides rich text and multimedia functionality leaving detailed trails of sensitive user information that can span long periods of time. Allowing users to manage the privacy implications both on the sender and the receiver side can help to increase confidence in the use of communication applications. Recently, in October 2017, one of the mobile messengers with the largest user base, WhatsApp, has introduced a feature to delete past messages from communication, both from the sender's and the receiver's logs.In this paper, we report on a study with 125 participants conducted in a between-subjects design. We explore the actual demand for deleting mobile messages, and we investigate how well users comprehend this functionality as implemented in popular messaging applications. We found statistically significant differences in users' understanding of message deletion between our three test conditions, comprising WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. 80 % of participants in the WhatsApp condition could correctly assess the effects of deleting messages, compared to only 49 % in the Skype condition.Our findings indicate that users demand a message deleting functionality and that they can more precisely estimate the capabilities of a deletion function when its effects are transparently explained in the application's user interface.

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