Platform perspective verse user perspective: The role of expression perspective in privacy disclosure

Abstract

This study investigates how the expression perspective impacts privacy disclosure when presenting privacy authorization interfaces to users. Using a series of five experiments, the authors discovered that potential users are more inclined to reveal personal information when authorization statements are presented from the user expression perspective (UEP) rather than the platform expression perspective (PEP). This finding is driven by users' perceptions of greater psychological ownership over personal data (POPD) from the UEP as opposed to the PEP. An EEG experiment also reveals that users pay less attention (a lower P2 amplitude) to the UEP (vs. PEP), decreasing the complexity of decision-making (a lower N2 amplitude). This effect persists even when the perceptual load is low but is attenuated under a high perceptual load. The current study contributes to the literature on linguistic framing and privacy disclosure, providing guidelines for platforms to effectively and ethically acquire users' private information.