scholarly journals Privacy cynicism: A new approach to the privacy paradox

Author(s):  
Christian Pieter Hoffmann ◽  
Christoph Lutz ◽  
Giulia Ranzini

Privacy concerns among Internet users are consistently found to be high. At the same time, these concerns do not appear to generate a corresponding wave of privacy protection behavior. A number of studies have addressed the apparent divergence between users’ privacy concerns and behavior, with results varying according to context. Previous research has examined user trust, lack of risk awareness and the privacy calculus as potential solutions to the “privacy paradox”. Complementing these perspectives, we propose that some users faced with seemingly overwhelming privacy threats develop an attitude of “privacy cynicism”, leading to a resigned neglect of protection behavior. Privacy cynicism serves as a cognitive coping mechanism, allowing users to rationalize taking advantage of online services despite serious privacy concerns. We conduct an interdisciplinary literature review to define the core concept, then empirically substantiate it based on qualitative data collected among German Internet users.

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482097495
Author(s):  
Tal Morse ◽  
Michael Birnhack

Scholars have observed a gap between users’ stated preferences to protect their privacy and their actual behavior. This is the privacy paradox. This article queries the persistence of the privacy paradox after death. A survey of a representative sample of Israeli Internet users inquired of perceptions, preferences, and actions taken by users regarding their digital remains. The analysis yielded three distinct groups: (1) users interested in preserving privacy posthumously but do not act accordingly; for these users, the privacy paradox persists posthumously; (2) users who match their behavior to their preferences; for these users, the privacy paradox is resolved; and (3) users interested in sharing their personal data posthumously but do not make the appropriate provisions. This scenario is the inverted privacy paradox. This new category has yet to be addressed in the literature. We present some explanations for the persistence of the posthumous privacy paradox and for the inverted privacy paradox.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1382
Author(s):  
Marija Kuzmanovic ◽  
Gordana Savic

Personal privacy on online social networks (OSN) is becoming increasingly important. The collection and misuse of personal information can affect people’s behavior and can have a broader impact on civil society. The aim of this paper is to explore the privacy paradox phenomenon on OSNs that is reflected in the gap between OSN users’ privacy concerns and behavior and to introduce a new segmentation framework based on preference data from conjoint analysis. For the purpose of the study, an online survey on four dimensions of OSNs has been conducted. Conjoint analysis has been employed on collected data to reveal users’ preferences, followed by two-step cluster analysis for the preference-based segmentation. The characteristics of the resulting clusters were compared with self-reported behavior and privacy concerns, as well as the results of the Westin Privacy Segmentation approach. The results suggest that conjoint analysis can improve users’ segmentation and consequently provide better solutions for avoiding the gap between users’ concerns, attitudes, and behavior.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Sun ◽  
Shuyue Fang ◽  
Yujong Hwang

Social e-commerce has steadily emerged as a current trend for an enormous amount of Internet users. Despite the popularity and prevalence of social e-commerce, many users hesitate to disclose their information due to privacy concerns. This resistance from users impedes the development of social e-commerce enterprises. In order to help enterprises collect more user information and establish better development strategies, this research builds on the Privacy Antecedent-Privacy Concern-Outcomes (APCO) model and the theory of privacy calculus. This research investigates how the privacy antecedents of hot topic interactivity and group buying experience influence users’ privacy concerns and perceived benefits as well as how to further influence users’ information disclosure behavior. The results from 406 questionnaire responses indicate that hot topic interactivity and group buying experience have significant negative impacts on privacy concerns and significant positive impacts on perceived benefits. Privacy concerns negatively influence the behavior of information disclosure while perceived benefits positively influence the behavior of information disclosure. Based on these results, social e-commerce enterprises should promote users’ behaviors of hot topic interactivity and group buying to stimulate users’ information disclosure behavior.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 5163
Author(s):  
Byoungsoo Kim ◽  
Daekil Kim

This study explored the formation mechanisms of users’ disclosing behaviors from the perspectives of the privacy paradox. The theoretical framework incorporates perceived control over personal information and subjective norms into the privacy calculus model. The proposed theoretical framework was empirically tested using survey data collected from 350 Facebook users. The findings show that users’ intention to disclose personal information has a marginally significant effect on users’ disclosing behaviors. The analysis results reveal that privacy concerns negatively affect the intention to disclose personal information while they are not significantly related to users’ disclosing behaviors. This study found that perceived control over personal information plays a significant role in enhancing trust in social network site (SNS) providers, users’ intention to disclose personal information, and users’ disclosing behaviors. Moreover, perceived control over personal information mitigates the level of privacy concerns. Several implications for research and practice are described.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Dienlin ◽  
Ye Sun

In their meta-analysis on how privacy concerns and perceived privacy risks are related to online disclosure intention and behavior, Yu et al. (2020) conclude that “the ‘privacy paradox’ phenomenon [...] exists in our research model” (p. 8). In this comment, we contest this conclusion and present evidence and arguments against it. We find three areas of problems: (1) flawed logic of hypothesis testing; (2) erroneous and implausible results; (3) questionable decision to use only the direct effect of privacy concerns on disclosure behavior as evidence in testing the privacy paradox. In light of these issues and to help guide future research, we propose a research agenda for the privacy paradox. We encourage researchers to (1) go beyond the null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), (2) engage in open science practices, (3) refine theoretical explications, (4) consider confounding, mediating, and boundary variables, and (5) improve the rigor of causal inference. Overall, while we value this meta-analytic effort by Yu et al., we caution its readers that, contrary to the authors’ claim, it does not offer evidence in support of the privacy paradox.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-258
Author(s):  
Thomas Groß

Abstract Internet Users’ Information Privacy Concerns (IUIPC-10) is one of the most endorsed privacy concern scales. It is widely used in the evaluation of human factors of PETs and the investigation of the privacy paradox. Even though its predecessor Concern For Information Privacy (CFIP) has been evaluated independently and the instrument itself seen some scrutiny, we are still missing a dedicated confirmation of IUIPC-10, itself. We aim at closing this gap by systematically analyzing IUIPC’s construct validity and reliability. We obtained three mutually independent samples with a total of N = 1031 participants. We conducted a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on our main sample to assert the validity and reliability of IUIPC-10. Having found weaknesses, we proposed a respecified instrument IUIPC-8 with improved psychometric properties. Finally, we confirmed our findings on a validation sample. While we found sound foundations for content validity and could confirm the overall three-dimensionality of IUIPC-10, we observed evidence of biases in the question wording and found that IUIPC-10 consistently missed the mark in evaluations of construct validity and reliability, calling into question the unidimensionality of its sub-scales Awareness and Control. Our respecified scale IUIPC-8 offers a statistically significantly better model and outperforms IUIPC-10’s construct validity and reliability. The disconfirming evidence on IUIPC-10’s construct validity raises doubts how well it measures the latent variable Information Privacy Concern. The less than desired reliability could yield spurious and erratic results as well as attenuate relations with other latent variables, such as behavior. Thereby, the instrument could confound studies of human factors of PETs or the privacy paradox, in general.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1168-1187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Lutz ◽  
Christian Pieter Hoffmann ◽  
Giulia Ranzini

Ever since empirical studies found only a weak, if any, relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behavior, scholars have struggled to explain the so-called privacy paradox. Today, a number of theoretical arguments illuminate users’ privacy rationales, including the privacy calculus, privacy literacy, and contextual differentiations. A recent approach focuses on user resignation, apathy, or fatigue. In this piece, we concentrate on privacy cynicism, an attitude of uncertainty, powerlessness, mistrust, and resignation toward data handling by online services that renders privacy protection subjectively futile. We discuss privacy cynicism in the context of data capitalism, as a coping mechanism to address the tension between digital inclusion and a desire for privacy. Moreover, we introduce a measure for privacy cynicism and investigate the phenomenon based on a large-scale survey in Germany. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of the construct, differentiating its relationships with privacy concerns, threat experience, Internet skills, and protection behavior.


2017 ◽  
pp. 88-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Drobyshevsky ◽  
P. Trunin ◽  
A. Bozhechkova ◽  
E. Gorunov ◽  
D. Petrova

The article investigates the Bank of Russia information policy using a new approach to measuring information effects on Russian data, including the analysis of the tonality of news reports, as well as internet users’ queries on Google. The efficiency of regulator’s information signals is studied using EGARCH-, VAR- models, as well as nonparametric tests. The authors conclude that the regulator communicates effectively in terms of the predictability of interest rate policy, the degree to which information signals affect the money and foreign exchange markets.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
David MacInnes

The nature of social organization during the Orcadian Neolithic has been the subject of discussion for several decades with much of the debate focused on answering an insightful question posed by Colin Renfrew in 1979. He asked, how was society organised to construct the larger, innovative monuments of the Orcadian Late Neolithic that were centralised in the western Mainland? There are many possible answers to the question but little evidence pointing to a probable solution, so the discussion has continued for many years. This paper takes a new approach by asking a different question: what can be learned about Orcadian Neolithic social organization from the quantitative and qualitative evidence accumulating from excavated domestic structures and settlements?In an attempt to answer this question, quantitative and qualitative data about domestic structures and about settlements was collected from published reports on 15 Orcadian Neolithic excavated sites. The published data is less extensive than hoped but is sufficient to support a provisional answer: a social hierarchy probably did not develop in the Early Neolithic but almost certainly did in the Late Neolithic, for which the data is more comprehensive.While this is only one approach of several possible ways to consider the question, it is by exploring different methods of analysis and comparing them that an understanding of the Orcadian Neolithic can move forward.


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