Privacy and Economics

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    Who Quits Privacy-Invasive Online Platform Operators? A Segmentation Study with Implications for the Privacy Paradox
    ( 2021-01-05) Hermes, Sebastian ; Sutanrikulu, Anela ; Schreieck, Maximilian ; Krcmar, Helmut
    Although individuals are concerned about their privacy, it is increasingly difficult to withdraw from privacy-invasive platform operators and keep activities private. IS research has identified the privacy paradox as a phenomenon and information asymmetries as one critical reason behind users’ dichotomy between privacy concern and behavior. However, prior work neglected to investigate (1) the characteristics of consumers caught in the privacy paradox, (2) new areas of information asymmetries such as knowledge about alternative services, and (3) new privacy-decision processes such as quitting privacy-invasive platform operators. To close these gaps, we conducted a representative segmentation study of Google and its services across five countries guided by the theory of planned behavior. Our results identify three clusters and indicate that the privacy paradox is only prevalent in two of them. Consumers in these two clusters lack knowledge about data integration, data usage, and alternative services.
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    Semi-Automated Analysis of Large Privacy Policy Corpora
    ( 2021-01-05) Dima, Alden ; Massey, Aaron
    Regulators, policy makers, and consumers are interested in proactively identifying services with acceptable or compliant data use policies, privacy policies, and terms of service. Academic requirements engineering researchers and legal scholars have developed qualitative, manual approaches to conducting requirements analysis of policy documents to identify concerns and compare services against preferences or standards. In this research, we develop and present an approach to conducting large-scale, qualitative, prospective analyses of policy documents with respect to the wide-variety of normative concerns found in policy documents. Our approach uses techniques from natural language processing, including topic modeling and summarization. We evaluate our approach in an exploratory case study that attempts to replicate a manual legal analysis of roughly 200 privacy policies from seven domains in a semi-automated fashion at a larger scale. Our findings suggest that this approach is promising for some concerns.
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    Information Disclosure in Mobile Device: Examining the Influence of Information Relevance and Recipient
    ( 2021-01-05) Leom, Ming Di ; Deegan, Gaye ; Martini, Ben ; Boland, John
    Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) in mobile platforms typically restrict undesired information flow based on its sensitivity. However, sensitivity is often regarded as dichotomous and inflexible to the ever-changing contexts. Improving the effectiveness of PETs requires a better understanding of these contexts. In this paper, we examine the influence of contextual factors in users’ mobile usage based on Nissenbaum’s framework of contextual integrity. Specifically, we conducted a user study (n = 2889) to investigate the influence of relevance of information types on the willingness of disclosure towards typical groups of recipient. While the results suggest a significant relationship between information relevance (of different information) and willingness to disclose (to different recipients), closer examination reveals the relationship is not always clear-cut, and there is a potential influence of recipient. Therefore, incorporating the recipient factor can serve as a potential improvement to the existing approach in privacy management in the mobile device.
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    Individual Privacy Empowerment: Exploring the trade-offs between Information Sensitivity and Compensation
    ( 2021-01-05) Frimpong, Bright ; Sun, Jun
    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.
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    Introduction to the Minitrack on Privacy and Economics
    ( 2021-01-05) Sørensen, Lene ; Khajuria, Samant ; Skouby, Knud