Privacy Online: Not Always What it Seems

Stumbled across some research that is just too interesting not to share. I am currently graduating on location aware data and how it can be used to stimulate or aide ad-hoc interactions and this is a cut and paste from an early draft:

No discussion about location awareness would be complete without having mentioned privacy: the nature of the work demands it. However, when it comes to privacy things are not always what they seem. By interviewing almost 400 respondents Ackerman, Cranor, & L. F. Reagle, (1999) identified 3 groups of people, based on privacy concerns: Fundamentalists, consisting out of 17%, a Pragmatic Majority totaling 56% and lastly the Marginally Concerned with 27%. These last two groups are of little concern, the marginally concerned give away information under most circumstances, expressing merely mild concern about privacy. Pragmatists are generally concerned about data but these concerns seem to fade when privacy measures are visibly in place. This, by itself is fairly positive sign: a system designed to take care of the concerns of the pragmatic majority and to a certain extend the marginally concerned would be sufficient to satisfy a large percentage of users.
Of special interest are this first group of people, who seems to be the most problematic with regards to privacy. To better illustrate how fundamental this group of people is, a quote:

The privacy fundamentalists were extremely concerned about any use of their data and generally unwilling to provide their data to Web sites, even when privacy protection measures were in place. They were twice as likely as the other groups to report having been a victim of an invasion of privacy on the Internet. About a third of the fundamentalists refused to answer our survey question about their household income (as compared with 14% of the pragmatists and 3% of the marginally concerned).(Ackerman, Cranor, & L. F. Reagle, 1999)

This paints a pretty negative picture about this 17%. However, as mentioned, things are not what they seem. A follow up study by Spiekermann, Großklags and Berendt, (2001) took this study a step further by not only asking questions about privacy but also testing how much respondents were willing to disclose. The study was conducted by asking questions about personal information, some of which were only slightly related to the task. The results were surprising: large percentages of respondents answered all of the questions asked and out the group indentified as fundamentalists, 86% of the questions were answered. To truly see how remarkable this finding is, refer back to the quote describing this group.

Recent studies about this subject seems to further strengthen the evidence that people are willing, and in fact do, disclose much more than they say they do. Garde-Perik, Markopoulos, Ruyter, Eggen, and Ijsselsteijn (2008) researched the subject by presenting respondents with music recommendation system, one of which functions by disclosing favorite artists and the other by disclosing personal information. Respondents seemed to have very little concerns about disclosing information for the perceived benefits of such a music recommendation system and the authors conclude by saying that considering the ease with which users disclose information that they consider personal, safeguards may be needed to prevent disclosure in contexts in which this is not safe. (Garde-Perik, Markopoulos, Ruyter, Eggen, & Ijsselsteijn, 2008)

This just illustrates that when it comes to privacy, what people do and what they say don’t always correspond. It also shows that if the right design decisions are made and proper control and assurance given about personal data, that in fact, very few people would not be willing to disclose such information.

Works Cited
Ackerman, M. S., Cranor, & L. F. Reagle, J. (1999). Privacy in e-commerce: Examining user scenarios and privacy preferences. Proceedings of the ACMConference on Electronic Commerce , 1-8.
Garde-Perik, E. v., Markopoulos, P., Ruyter, B. d., Eggen, B., & Ijsselsteijn, W. (2008, February Unknown). Investigating Pricacy Attitudes and Behaviour in Relation to Personalization. Social Science Computer Review , 26 (1), pp. 20-46.
Spiekermann, S., Großklags, J., & Berendt, B. (2001). E-privacy in 2nd generation e-commerce: Privacy preferences versus actual behavior. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce , 38-47.