Relative Privacy Valuations Under Varying Disclosure Characteristics

Abstract

We investigate changes to the value that individuals place on the online disclosure of their private information in the presence of multiple privacy factors. We capture individuals’ willingness-to-accept for a privacy disclosure in a series of randomized experiments that manipulate characteristics of a required privacy disclosure by altering the information context, the intended secondary use of the disclosed private information, and the requirement to disclose personally identifying information. We collect data from two populations (college students and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers) to aid with generalizability of our results. Across the experiments, we consistently observe null effects for each of the privacy factors. The results provide a unique perspective on privacy valuations by showing that results from prior research on simple privacy decisions may not translate to more realistic, complex privacy disclosure decisions that involve multiple factors. Our findings suggest that disclosing private information may be an all or nothing type of decision as opposed to an activation of individual factors proposed by prior literature as important in a multidimension private information disclosure. This study provides managerial insight into the possible evolution of online disclosure decisions, especially in settings that incorporate multiple disclosure dimensions.