Low Effort and Privacy – How Textual Priming Affects Privacy Concerns of Email Service Users

Abstract

The integration of digital applications and systems into the everyday routines of users is inevitably progressing. Ubiquitous and invisible computing requires the perspective of a new user and the inclusion of insights from related disciplines such as behavioral economics or social psychology. This paper takes up the call for research by Dinev et al. (2015) and examines the influence of textual priming elements on the privacy concerns of users of email accounts. The paper provides an operationalization of a privacy concern as a dependent variable, incorporated in an online experiment with 276 participants. The results show highly significant differences between the groups investigated by the experiment. Specifically, the users of different email providers show interesting results. While users of Gmail show no significant reaction in the experiment, users of other email providers show significant differences in the experimental setting.