Affinities in Privacy Attitudes: A Psychological Approach to Unifying Informational and Decisional Privacy

Abstract

Many scholars have questioned whether there is an inherent connection between decisional privacy issues such as abortion and information privacy issues such as the protection of consumer data. This article presents an empirical survey that examines the extent to which public attitudes about a wide range of privacy issues are actually interrelated. The data show consistent relationships between views on decisional and informational privacy across many domains. Further, views toward many of these privacy issues appear to stem from common ideological and psychological commitments, such as beliefs about submission to authority, social conformity, and the value of personal secrets. These factors explain nearly half the variance in information privacy attitudes and nearly twenty percent of the variance in decision privacy attitudes. This pattern suggests that there is an internal coherence to privacy attitudes and, therefore, that it may be worth reframing existing privacy doctrines around these unifying principles.