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Analyzing user reviews of seven US digital contact-tracing apps for COVID-19, this article unpacks how the new form of surveillance technology is understood and experienced by individuals during a global health crisis. The findings suggest that the app users felt empowered via self-tracking capacity and expressed community-level care and concerns, including those regarding the marginalized. At the same time, the users were raising doubts over technical effectiveness, navigating varying levels of voluntary choice available, and negotiating privacy concerns depending on the (dis)trust they held of institutional entities behind the governance of the apps. We argue that it is critical to investigate how surveillance technologies are situated across horizontal and vertical relationships in people's everyday lives to fully understand the individual and societal acceptance and/or refusal of the very systems during crises.

This study explores how emerging US data privacy regulations are discussed at state and federal levels, examining Twitter discourse around Senate public hearings on data privacy and public forums on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The recent legal steps reflect growing public outcry over corporate data misuses and lack of appropriate legislation. The findings suggest that the issue public of Twitter users in this study largely considered corporations and the government as untrustworthy actors for privacy legislation. The political distrust was raising doubts over regulatory capture and if a future US federal privacy law will be weaker than state laws (e.g., CCPA) while overriding them. The study explores implications of the findings on the current deadlock over the state preemption clause in developing a comprehensive federal privacy law. I argue that the emerging regulatory efforts on data privacy may not be effective unless the public trust in institutions is regained in the US and that the continuing absence of a federal law amid the political distrust can leave people with limited individual privacy strategies as a result.

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