Abstract
This vignette-based study examines how generalized trust and the need for cognitive closure relate to the perceived acceptability of contemporary business methods of personal data collection. Subjects are exposed to four scenarios that describe a method of personal data collection, involving either brand-name companies or generic descriptors of companies. After each scenario, subjects rate how acceptable they find the practice of data collection, along with the frequency and quality of experiences that they have had with the company (for brand names) or type of company (for generic descriptors). Judgments of perceived acceptability are analyzed, both across the portfolio of judgments and within each separate scenario. While analyses of each separate scenario point to the context-dependency of the perceived acceptability of data collection, several results stand out when analyzing the subjects’ portfolios of responses in the aggregate. Higher generalized trust is linked to a higher average acceptability rating, and the effect is stronger when companies are described with brand names rather than generic descriptors. Uniformly, however, no relationship is found between need for cognitive closure and perceived acceptability. Additionally, positive experiences are found to be a stronger predictor of perceived acceptability of data collection than frequency of use.
Highlights
With the omnipresent usage of e-commerce and social media, and with the increased reliance of companies and governments on “big data”, there are growing concerns about the ways that personal information is collected and utilized
Since much earlier research has pointed to the context-dependency of privacy preferences [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20], this study examines respondents’ perceived acceptability of data collection across a portfolio of scenarios, and links acceptability scores to generalized trust and need for closure scores, as well as to the frequency of use and the quality of experience associated with a company or product
In these regressions, whose coefficients are presented in terms of odds ratios, the positive experience variable is associated with a significant (p < 0.05) increase in the likelihood that a respondent finds data collection to be acceptable for all scenarios, except for the generic and brand versions of the e-pay/Venmo scenario
Summary
With the omnipresent usage of e-commerce and social media, and with the increased reliance of companies and governments on “big data”, there are growing concerns about the ways that personal information is collected and utilized. Both online activities (e.g., social media usage, online shopping, and internet browsing) and offline activities (e.g., shopping with loyalty cards, credit card usage, GPS monitoring, and fitness tracking) involve personal data collection. Consumers face uncertainty regarding how their data will be put to use They are, vulnerable to the actions of parties that collect it. Anxiety over data collection can pose problems for entities that collect personal data, to the extent that consumers who know of and fear collection avoid such entities [1], and journalists publicize perceived maleficence in data collection, and turn public opinion away from the offenders [2,3]
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