**6. Discussion and Conclusions**

#### *6.1. Key Findings*

The results of the study suggest that the overuse of DCTAs triggers awareness of the consequences and ascription of responsibility, that awareness of the consequences is an important antecedent of ascription of responsibility, and that the triggered awareness of the consequences and ascription of responsibility activate people's personal norms. Guided by personal norms, people will continue to cooperate with the government to prevent COVID-19. Such results again validate the NAM theory in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and are also in general agreement with the results of some studies on DCTA [8,10,11,18,21,30,31]. The tracking ability of a DCTA plays a role in monitoring people for the prevention of COVID-19. First, when a DCTA accurately tracks everyone's travel trajectory and health status, people are worried about being held precisely accountable for the consequences of their bad behavior. Second, the lack of privacy protection in a DCTA may also cause people to worry that they may be stigmatized in the event that they are infected [18]. Finally, the deficiencies of a DCTA's positioning accuracy can raise concerns [8,21]; people are urged to exercise caution to prevent being wrongly identified as a close contact and being investigated. The awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility that people develop under DCTA monitoring will compel people to consider it a pro-social moral obligation to cooperate with the government to prevent COVID-19, and ultimately, to consistently cooperate with the government to prevent COVID-19.

The overuse of DCTAs has indeed also inconvenienced people in their lives, thus weakening their willingness to actively cooperate with the government in preventing COVID-19 (moderating effects of perceived life inconvenience). People use DCTAs in the spirit of personal and social interests [4]. However, it is human nature to "tend to benefit and avoid harm" [49]. The inconvenience of living with a DCTA can cause people to weigh the pros and cons of preventing COVID-19. Studies have demonstrated that people tolerate privacy risks in DCTA use when the privacy risks they pose are lower than the health risks [26,50]. It is reasonable to infer that when the inconvenience caused by a DCTA exceeds the level of responsibility required, people will choose to take responsibility rather than endure the inconvenience to life. In addition, when the inconvenience caused by a

DCTA results in considerable losses, people may have the feeling that "DCTA has already caused me losses, so what is my obligation and responsibility to cooperate?" However, the reality is that due to the government's strict precautions, the fear of being forcefully held accountable far outweighs the perceived inconvenience of living with a DCTA. Therefore, from the perspective of personal interest, even if people are dissatisfied, they are forced to develop a sense of responsibility and personal norms to cooperate with the government in preventing COVID-19 due to the awareness of the dire consequences. This explains the mechanism by which the inconvenience caused by the overuse of DCTAs plays a moderate-to-high intensity-weakening role in the relationships between awareness of the consequences and ascription of responsibility and between ascription of responsibility and personal norms; it does not directly negatively affect the relationship between ascription of responsibility and personal norms.

However, the debilitating effect of perceived life inconvenience from the overuse of DCTAs on consequence awareness and personal norms was not confirmed in this study. This inspires us to suggest that the inconvenient effects of a DCTA may need to be combined with precise accountability. The inconvenience caused by the overuse of a DCTA is magnified in the process of precise accountability, such as privacy concerns. When there is no accountability process, privacy is only restricted to a very few managers, and once the accountability process is involved, it can lead to stigmatization due to privacy breaches. Therefore, people will always carry this psychological pressure when using a DCTA. If the process of precise accountability is missing, a DCTA brings about only inconvenience to life, and people only need to measure the relationship between the inconvenience to mobility and prevention of COVID-19; they will naturally think that cooperating with the government to prevent COVID-19 is only a moral responsibility and will have no sense of responsibility for preventing COVID-19.
