Individual Privacy Empowerment: Exploring the trade-offs between Information Sensitivity and Compensation

To provide personalized services and remain competitive, many online companies depend on individual disclosure of personal information. An emerging common theme, in the quest for privacy solutions, is the idea to empower individuals to control the management of their personal information. This study proposes a third-option design that seeks to empower users when signing up for an online service. We also measure individual privacy empowerment in a 2*2 experimental design study (reward/utility-limit mechanism to high/low sensitivity information context) using the proposed third-option design. Results from the multigroup analysis indicate that respondents prefer the reward mechanism over the utility-limit mechanism when asked to disclose less sensitive data. However, the utility-limit mechanism is preferred in the highly sensitive group indicating that a simple linear relationship does not exist between monetary rewards and information sensitivity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY EMPOWERMENT IN ELECTRONIC SERVICE

This study is motivated by the many reports on the lack of individual privacy empowerment in Facebook’s and Google’s recent research programs. Literature on privacy empowerment has mostly focused on the e-commerce context where participants are often perceived as potential customers and data collected are mostly for advertising purposes. In this study, we demonstrate how e-service companies can empower individuals to participate in their research programs and how such perceived empowerment can differ in different scenarios of data sensitivity. Three dimensions of privacy empowerment (informativity, optionality, and controllability) are identified and modeled in an information sensitivity context. Findings indicate that while informativity is very crucial at all levels of data sensitivity, optionality is only essential to achieving privacy empowerment in a highly sensitive data context. Practically, we recommend companies to integrate both informativity and optionality into their research designs to provide participants with a perceived sense of privacy empowerment

A United States Perspective on the Ethical and Legal Issues of Spyware.

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