Consumer Preferences for Privacy Management Systems

This work presents insights into consumer preferences regarding Privacy Management Systems in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The authors perform a Choice-Based Conjoint experiment with consumers (n = 589) to elicit preferences over four attributes and compute usage likelihoods for all product configurations. Results show that data sharing for marketing purposes and discounts are the most important attributes for consumers. Furthermore, consumers prefer digital access to privacy-related information, detailed rights management for data sharing and no data sharing for marketing purposes. Moreover, a cluster analysis reveals differing importance weights across clusters. The study concludes that incorporating consumer preferences into the design and development process of Privacy Management Systems could increase their use and effectiveness, ultimately strengthening consumers’ privacy rights and companies’ legal compliance. The authors suggest researching legal, business, and consumer requirements more holistically to converge these perspectives to improve Privacy Management Systems adoptions

Facebook Users Attitudes towards Secondary Use of Personal Information

This paper reports on a study of how user attitudes to institutional privacy change after exposing users to potential inferences that can be made from information disclosed on Facebook. Two sets of focus group sessions with Facebook users were conducted. Three sessions were conducted by demonstrating to the users, on a general level, what can be inferred from posts using prototypical software called DataBait. Another set of three sessions let the users experience the potential inferences from their own actual Facebook profiles by using the DataBait tool. Findings suggest that the participants’ attitudes to secondary use of information changed from affective to cognitive when they were exposed to potential third-party inferences using their own actual personal information. This observation calls for more research into online tools that allow users to manage and educate themselves dynamically about their own disclosure practices