‘You must not know about me’—On the willingness to share personal data

Abstract

Although understanding preferences for privacy is of great importance to economists, businesses and politicians little is known about the factors that shape the individual willingness to share personal data. This article provides three experimental studies with a total of 470 participants that help characterizing individual preferences for sharing personal data varying the characteristics of potential recipients. We find that participants' willingness to share personal data with anonymous recipients decreases with the number of recipients. However, social distance to the recipients and the extent of personal data a single recipient receives do not decrease the willingness to share personal data. Further, we provide a methodological insight by showing that verification of personal data is essential when eliciting privacy preferences. JEL Classification: C90, C91, D80, D82

The Willingness to Sell Personal Data

“…Field settings also often lack details regarding who is going to use the data and for which purpose. Incentivized laboratory experiments sometimes disclose the data to the other laboratory participants (Huberman et al ., ; Grossklags and Acquisti, ) or to students at the same or at a different university (Schudy and Utikal, ), so the receivers do not actively seek to gain information and they are not very likely to actually use it for any purpose. Again, a lack of transparency about the use of the data might be realistic in some situations that people face in everyday life and might thus be relevant for policy.…”

Consumers’ Need of Privacy Protection – Experimental Results

“…While the above-mentioned studies focused mostly on sharing data with stores and businesses, a slightly different approach to the privacy problem was chosen by S. Schudy and V. Utikal (2015), who analysed the willingness to provide private data to unknown recipients. The study was conducted on students of two universities in Germany within several experiments.…”

Does Imperfect Data Privacy Stop People from Collecting Personal Data?

“…Such information is on the one hand valuable to the individual and, on the other hand, valuable to companies. So far, the behavioural literature on preferences for privacy has mainly focused on information transmission, i.e., on when and why people share their personal data (see for instance [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]). This research has informed policy makers from which privacy regulations individuals may benefit or suffer.…”

“…First, we extend the theoretical discussion about the consequences of Perfect Privacy and Disclosure Duty for testing and disclosing information (see also [25]) by asking how people's behaviour should change when Perfect Privacy cannot be guaranteed due to a positive probability of involuntary data transfer (e.g., data leakage). 7 Second, we enrich the so far theoretical discussion of privacy regulations by providing experimental evidence on the relation of privacy institutions, information acquisition and information disclosure. We provide a novel and parsimonious laboratory experiment that allows for the identification of causal effects of three different privacy institutions (Disclosure Duty, Consent Law with Perfect Privacy and Imperfect Privacy, i.e., a Consent Law environment where patients are not in full control of their collected data).…”

“…6 See also Kierkegaard [22] who discuss the merits and weaknesses of a centralized European health record system as planned by the European Commission's Directive 2011/24/EU and Peppet [23] for a discussion with respect to legal aspects of privacy institutions. 7 Matthews and Postlewaite [25] focus on sellers' testing behavior in the context of product quality when disclosure of test results is mandatory or voluntary and test results may be beneficial to consumers. For Perfect Privacy and Disclosure Duty our model mirrors the logic of their analysis and can be understood as a simplified version of their framework.…”