 During the COVID-00 pandemic, contact tracing has become a major government effort to slow down the spread of the infectious disease. As societies started implementing contact tracing technologies, they encountered tensions between conflicting values involved in protecting human rights (e.g., freedom of movement versus health security). These tensions sparked a contestation process over the meaning of contact tracing technologies. Our study investigates how two societies, South Korea and Singapore, grappled with the meaning of contact tracing technologies during the COVID-00 pandemic. We frame our inductive findings by drawing on category research to build a theoretical model of the contestation processes around new technologies. We contribute to category research by showing how a societal value system involving conflicting values is invoked in contesting the meaning of new technologies. We unpack how category contestation is shaped by and shapes technology design and use, which, in turn, is shaped by societal power structures. 