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, a direct examination of how complying with privacy notice is related to meeting privacy expectations online has not been performed. This paper reports the findings of an empirical examination of how judgments about privacy notices are related to privacy expectations. A factorial vignette study describing online consumer tracking asked respondents to rate the degree online scenarios met consumers’ privacy expectations or complied with a privacy notice. The results suggest respondents perceived the privacy notice as offering greater protections than the actual privacy notice. Perhaps most problematic, 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 over reliance on privacy notices. Considering the importance of privacy notices in managing privacy online, more work should extend this study to understand how consumers understand notices and how consumers’ perceptions of privacy notices map to their privacy expectations – if at all.