Abstract
Privacy policies provide Internet users with the possibility to inform themselves about websites’ usage of their disclosed personal data. Strikingly, however, most people tend not to read privacy policies because they are long and cumbersome, indicating that people do not wish to expend much (cognitive) effort on reading such policies. The present study aimed to examine whether shorter privacy policies can be beneficial in informing users about a social networking site’s (SNS) privacy practices, and to investigate associations between variables relevant for privacy decision-making using one theory-based integrative model. In an online experiment, participants (<em>N</em> = 305) were asked to create a personal account on an SNS after being given the option to read the privacy policy. Privacy policy length and the SNS’s level of privacy were varied, creating a 2 (policy length) x 2 (level of privacy) between-subjects design. The results revealed that participants who saw short policies spent less time on reading but gained higher knowledge about the SNS’s privacy practices—due to the fact that they spent more reading time per word. Factual privacy policy knowledge was found to be an indicator for participants’ subjective privacy perception. The perception and evaluation of the specific SNS´s privacy level influenced the assessment of privacy costs and benefits. Particularly when benefits were perceived as high, self-disclosure was increased.
Highlights
To fully enjoy the advantages of the Internet, users often need to disclose personal information to other users or to companies
In Hypothesis 2 (H2), we assumed that participants would have a higher reading time per word when confronted with a short privacy policy
The present study contributes to our understanding of online privacy in two ways: First, the findings indicate that shorter privacy policies can increase users’ reading accuracy and knowledge
Summary
To fully enjoy the advantages of the Internet, users often need to disclose personal information to other users or to companies. While benefits of sharing personal information often occur immediately and are easy to grasp (because they are the main reason for disclosure), users appear to have difficulties in predicting privacy costs, as they are often abstract and occur with a time delay (if they occur at all). Reading a website’s privacy policy is one possibility for Internet users to inform themselves about the privacy costs that might arise from using the respective website. The main reasons stated for reading policies only partially or not at all were that they are too long and too complex (European Commission, 2019), indicating that many users are unwilling to expend much time and cognitive effort on informing themselves about a website’s privacy practices
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