Privacy Notices as Tabula Rasa: An Empirical Investigation into how Complying with a Privacy Notice is Related to Meeting Privacy Expectations Online

Abstract

Recent privacy scholarship has focused on the failure of adequate notice and consumer choice as a tool to address consumers' privacy expectations online. However, there has not been a direct examination into how complying with a privacy notice is related to meeting privacy expectations online. This article reports the findings of two factorial vignette studies describing online consumer tracking, whereby respondents rated the degree to which online scenarios met their privacy expectations or complied with a privacy notice. The results suggest that respondents perceived the privacy notice as offering greater protections than it actually did. Perhaps most problematically, respondents projected the important factors of their privacy expectations onto the privacy notice. In other words, privacy notices became a tabula rasa for users' privacy expectations. The findings provide guidance for policy makers and firms to avoid unnecessary privacy violations caused by an overreliance on privacy notices. Considering the importance of privacy notices in managing privacy online, more work should extend this study to shed light on how consumers understand notices and how their perceptions of privacy notices map to their privacy expectations, if at all.