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Privacy attitudes, incentives and behaviours
Dr Ian Brown
Oxford Internet Institute
Overview
The privacy paradox Younger people and privacy Location privacy Medical privacy Behavioural economics and market failure Lessons for data protection governance
Privacy concerns
Source: Flash Eurobarometer #225 (2008: 7)
Attitudes vs. disclosure
Spiekermann, Grossklags and Berendt (2002)
Young people and privacy Most young people see Internet as private space for
talking to (already-known) friends, and target information to peer group
Lenhart et al. (2007) found stricter access controls on photos/videos by teens than adults (76% v 58% most of time/sometimes)
Teens showed higher privacy concerns with parental monitoring; parental discussions increased privacy concerns and reduced disclosure
Adult users of social media are developing similar behaviours – consequence of mediation, not age (Marwick et al. 2010)
Young adults and privacy
Hoofnagle et al. (2010) found very limited understanding of privacy laws among young adults – 42% answered all 5 questions incorrectly
Jones et al. surveyed 7,421 students at 40 US colleges. 75% concerned about passwords, SSNs, credit card numbers but few about SNSes due to insignificant consequences (2009)
Student information disclosure
What kind of personal information do you post online? (first year N=177, final year N=133) Oostveen (2010)
Sampling Facebook Experiences
Mobile phones carried by students Location retrieved with embedded GPS Subjects answer questions (e.g., sharing choices)
Facebook Application Location disclosed to friends
Server Data are collected in our server Questions are sent to participants through SMS
Aims To understand: Why do students share their location How (text, picture) When, to whom they share this location At what locations are they more willing to share
40 participants responded to over 2000 questions over 2 weeks Participants are more willing to share their location when they are in ‘Leisure’ or ‘Academic’ locations than in the ‘Library’ or in ‘Residential’ areas.
Location sharing
Abdesslem, Parris & Henderson (2010)
HIV record privacy Interviews with 41 African women living with HIV in
London who use the internet in relation to their health 6 months of fieldwork in 3 HIV clinics in London 2 focus groups at community support groups Participants asked about their experiences of being
diagnosed and living with HIV, information seeking and internet use
Privacy not mentioned by interviewer Aimed at ‘foregrounding practicalities’ in interviews
(Mol, 2002), and interviews were analysed and coded for how participants spoke about ‘doing privacy’
Manzanderani and Brown (2011)
Patient preferences Strong preference for HIV physicians over others
such as GPs due to perceptions of different types of confidentiality practices and professionalism
Strong resistance to moving practitioners Continuity of care stressed as important for privacy Took a long time to develop relationships of trust with
a given practitioner People from similar ethnic and cultural background
often resisted as a information source for fear of knowledge of a HIV positive diagnosis spreading to community and country of origin
Manzanderani and Brown (2011)
Sharing medical data
Source: The Use of Personal Health Information in Medical Research, Medical Research Council, June 2007 pp.54-55
Privacy is contextual “Contrary to the assumption … that people have
stable, coherent, preferences with respect to privacy, we find that concern about privacy … is highly sensitive to contextual factors” Privacy salience primes concerns “People, it seems, feel more comfortable providing
personal information on unprofessional sites that are arguably particularly likely to misuse it.”
“Covert inquiries … do not trigger concerns about privacy, and hence promote disclosure.”
John, Acquisti and Loewenstein (2011)
Homo economicus vs. sapiens
Bounded rationality Privacy risks are highly probabilistic,
cumulative, and difficult to calculate Most individuals bad at deferred
gratification, and have time-inconsistent preferences
Acquisti (2009)
Market failures in privacy Negative externalities – sale of personal data
without compensation to subject Information asymmetry – data gathered
ubiquitously and invisibly in a way few consumers understand
Privacy policies unreadable and difficult to verify/enforce, with unstable equilibrium. Seals and lemon markets
Information industries are highly concentrated; privacy ignored by competition regulators
Correcting market failure
Minimum standards of care – organisational and technical protections
Simplified privacy policies and breach disclosure reduce information asymmetry
More effective enforcement (group actions?) internalises cost of harms
New focus by privacy regulators on interoperability and defaults?
Romanosky and Acquisti (2009), Brown and Marsden (2008)
Lessons for DP governance
Basing privacy protections on fully-rational individual behaviour will have limited impact
Privacy and competition regulators may have to work together to ensure consumers have meaningful privacy choices
Continued regulatory intervention is needed to protect individual and societal interests in privacy
References