Cultural and generational influences on privacy concerns: a qualitative study in seven European countries

Abstract

This research examines how European citizens decide to disclose and protect their personal data and thereby reveals cultural and generational divides. Focus group discussions featured either young people, aged 15 to 24 years, or adults, between 25 and 70 years of age, and were conducted in seven EU member states. The results of a computer-aided text analysis with two complementary software packages suggest similarities and differences in participants' views and privacy concerns.Responsibility is relevant to personal data management, which represents a hotly contested issue. A geographical north-south divide appears for the importance of responsibility as opposed to trust.Moreover, people regard disclosure differently in the south (as a choice) and east (as forced) of Europe. Younger people express more positive attitudes toward data management, feel more responsible, and are more confident in their ability to prevent possible data misuse. Their lower privacy concerns and greater protective behaviours (i.e., a potential reversed privacy paradox) may help explain contradictory results in prior literature. These results offer significant and useful theoretical, managerial, and policy implications. 2011, p. 979). Despite some general agreement about the impact of culture on privacy, contradictory results call for more research too. To fill this gap, we focus on the privacy concerns of citizens from seven European countries and attempt to answer a second research question: How does culture influence privacy concerns and related behaviours, in particular for people from geographically proximate nations in Europe?In addition to culture, age dictates how people relate to IT, a phenomenon that influences their privacy concerns (e.g., Moscardelli & Divine, 2007). Young people who have grown up with the Internet tend to use social media more than older people, though this usage does not mean they are unconcerned about online privacy. Lenhart and Madden (2007) find that teenagers use various techniques to obscure their real location or personal details on social networking sites (SNS). New studies thus need to reframe the issue to determine the main privacy concerns of young people compared with those of older adults. We therefore investigate a third research question: How do people of different ages vary in their attitudes toward privacy and their subsequent behaviours?To answer these three questions, this study undertakes a qualitative assessment of Europeans' attitudes toward privacy, personal data disclosure, and protection using 14 focus groups across seven EU27 countries. Our work departs from most literature on privacy and its positivist paradigm, which provide controversial insights into how privacy concerns affect user behaviour (Krasnova et al., 2009).Research might suggest that people are reluctant to disclose personal information (Kelly & McKillop, 1996), yet in practice, many people voluntarily do so, particularly on blogs and online platforms.Existing quantitative research cannot explain these contradictions, n...

Cross-Cultural Privacy Prediction

“…Bellman et al [7] found opposite results, namely that power distance, individualism and masculinity are negatively associated with privacy concerns, and that uncertainty has no significant effect. Posey et al [38] and Miltgen and Peyrat-Guillard [33] found that focus groups in individualistic societies were more hesitant to disclose information than those in collectivistic societies. Similarly, Cho et al [11] found that Internet users from highly individualistic cultures exhibited greater concerns about online privacy.…”

Is It Harmful? Re-examining Privacy Concerns

“…The geographic divide was confirmed in the qualitative study of seven European countries, identifying main privacy concerns influencing information disclosure and a variety of privacy fears among different nationalities [34]. Similarly, other studies showed differences among respondents from North America and Europe [45], and France and Hong Kong [22].…”

“…However, some of these findings show that the impact of gender on privacy attitudes and behaviors is indirect or insignificant [23,6,36]. Regarding the age, there seems to be a general tendency that older generations are more concerned about their privacy than the younger ones [51,34]. Nevertheless, it does not mean that younger people ignore it.…”

Framing the future of privacy: citizens’ metaphors for privacy in the coming digital society

“…2 Focus groups are a suitable data collection method for studying complex topics because they allow participants to explore issues using their own words [39]. Focus groups have been utilised to study privacy concerns in the context of new technologies [23,40], but to our knowledge focus groups have not been used to study individuals' thinking on the future of privacy.…”

“…Miltgen and Peyrat-Guillard [23] have previously utilised focus groups in an extensive study of privacy concerns, but their focus was on understanding current privacy behaviour, disclosure and protection, rather than examining subjective privacy conceptions in the context of the longterm future.…”