Privacy Regulation and Barriers to Public Health

The COVID-19 pandemic has gravely disrupted the world’s economy and killed millions of people. A safe and effective vaccine was developed remarkably swiftly, but as of yet uptake of the vaccine has been slow. This paper explores one potential explanation of delayed adoption of the vaccine, which is data privacy concerns. We explore two contrasting regulations that vary across states that have the potential to affect the perceived privacy risk associated with receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. The first regulation - an ‘identification requirement’ - increases privacy concerns by requiring individuals to verify personal information with government approved documentation. The second regulation - ‘anonymity protection’ - lowers privacy concerns by allowing individuals to remove personally identifying information from state-operated immunization registry systems. We investigate the effects of these privacy-reducing and privacy-protecting regulations on U.S. state-level COVID-19 vaccination rates. Using a panel data set, we find that identification requirements decrease vaccine demand, but that this negative effect is offset when individuals are able to remove information from an immunization registry. Our results remain consistent when controlling for CDC-defined barriers to vaccination, levels of misinformation, vaccine incentives, and states’ phase distribution of vaccine supply. These findings yield significant theoretical and practical contributions for privacy policy and public health. for CDC-defined barriers to vaccination, levels of misinformation, and phase distribution. The results are also robust to consideration of alternate explanations including variation between states in the level of vaccine misinformation, state protection from ICE enforcement, vaccine supply, and barriers to access of government-approved identification. Overall, our results suggest that privacy concerns contribute significantly to vaccine hesitancy, but that this hesitancy can be counteracted by privacy protections. Our findings offer significant research and practical contributions. The first contribution is to the information systems and economics literature evaluating the effect of privacy regulations on various aspects of technology Specifically, privacy regulations in general have been shown to reduce technology diffusion and usage However, regulations that emphasize individuals’ rights over their data have demonstrated more nuanced dynamics, including positive outcomes for consumers and firms 2021). This paper extends this literature by considering how information systems’ privacy protections interact with regulations increasing privacy concerns by requiring personal information. Our results highlight that privacy concerns associated with offline requirements for personal information can be addressable if privacy protections are in place for related digital systems. Importantly, these results highlight the potential to achieve policy aims of offline requirements for personal information (e.g., validation of recipients of treatment and benefits) while avoiding undesirable policy outcomes (e.g., vaccine hesitancy from privacy concerns). The second contribution empirical effects of privacy on a large-scale public health initiative can have critical consequences on individuals’ long-term health compared to other privacy policies. Two key public health emergency management health equity interaction between each phase and the linear daily time trend to control for trends in the length of time spent in each phase. Column (6) includes a three-way interaction between each state, phase, and the linear daily time trend. The interaction across the three dimensions controls for the trend in vaccination rates according to a specific state and the duration that the state is in each phase. The significance of our findings remains consistent as we include each of these controls for linear trend although the effect sizes decrease. offers useful insight into the impact of differing privacy regulations on COVID-19 vaccination rates.