Abstract
Personal data lie at the forefront of different business models and constitute the main source of revenue of several online companies. In many cases, consumers may have incomplete information or may be inattentive about the digital transactions of their data. This paper investigates whether highlighting positive or negative aspects of online privacy policies, thereby mitigating the informational problem, can affect consumers’ privacy actions and attitudes. Results of an online survey experiment indicate that participants adopt a more conservative stance on disclosing sensitive and identifiable information, even when positive attitudes of companies towards their privacy are made salient, compared to when privacy is not mentioned. On the other hand, they do not change their attitudes and social actions towards privacy. These findings suggest that privacy behavior is not necessarily sensitive to exposure to objective threats or benefits of disclosing personal information. Rather, people are inattentive and their dormant privacy concerns may manifest only when consumers are asked to think about privacy.
Highlights
In our experiment, highlighting positive features of the privacy tradeoff will make participants less concerned about privacy and we expect this to be reflected in people’s attitudes toward privacy and their willingness to engage is social action promoting privacy protection. Another possible driver of behavior in this study relates to the recent literature in economics that shows that limited attention, salience and cognitive costs impact decision making in a variety of contexts: consumption (Chetty et al, 2009; Hossain and Morgan, 2006; Bollinger et al, 2011; Allcott and Taubinsky, 2015), saving (Karlan et al, 2016), farming (Hanna et al, 2014) or school choice (Hastings and Weinstein, 2008)
We observed the self-disclosure of personal information by users, their stated concerns regarding privacy and their choice of giving a donation either to a charity advocating for privacy or to a charity not directly related to privacy issues
What we find is that whenever information is about privacy, the type of information does not matter, while information not mentioning privacy increases disclosure of personal data, without affecting either stated privacy concerns or social actions
Summary
In our experiment, highlighting positive (negative) features of the privacy tradeoff (such as protection of consumers’ personal data vs commercial exploitation of their data) will make participants less (more) concerned about privacy and we expect this to be reflected in people’s attitudes toward privacy and their willingness to engage is social action promoting privacy protection Another possible driver of behavior in this study relates to the recent literature in economics that shows that limited attention, salience and cognitive costs impact decision making in a variety of contexts: consumption (Chetty et al, 2009; Hossain and Morgan, 2006; Bollinger et al, 2011; Allcott and Taubinsky, 2015), saving (Karlan et al, 2016), farming (Hanna et al, 2014) or school choice (Hastings and Weinstein, 2008). Just mentioning the presence of privacy issues, such as how companies are adopting practices to protect users’ data, decreases self-disclosure This suggests that privacy concerns are dormant and may manifest when users are asked to think about privacy; and that privacy behavior is not necessarily sensitive to exposure to objective threats or benefits of personal information disclosure. Appendix A contains some additional results while Appendix B contains the news extracts
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