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With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a plethora of policies deployed by the governments to curb the spread of the virus and simultaneously sustain the fledgling economies. One of the tactics deployed by the governments related to slowing down the spread of the virus by tracing the contacts of individuals who were in proximity with those people that have been tested positive for COVID-19. Countries showed uneven success. The variety in responses was not only related to the extent to which the countries were impacted by the pandemic, but also by the way in which the governments decided to intervene in the management of this crisis. Hence, in this article, we analyze the variation in contact tracing technologies across countries. We propose that the type and quality of government intervention drive the differences in the rates of diffusion and adoption of contact tracing apps across countries. We …