Contextualized communication of privacy practices and personalization benefits: impacts on users' data sharing and purchase behavior

  • Authors:

  • Alfred Kobsa;Maximilian Teltzrow

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA;Institute of Information Systems, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • PET'04 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Consumer surveys demonstrated that privacy statements on the web are ineffective in alleviating users' privacy concerns. We propose a new user interface design approach in which the privacy practices of a website are explicated in a contextualized manner, and users' benefits in providing personal data clearly explained. To test the merits of this approach, we conducted a user experiment that compared two versions of a personalized web store: one with a traditional global disclosure and one that additionally provides contextualized explanations of privacy practices and personaliza tion benefits. We found that subjects in the second condition were sign ifi cantly more willing to share personal data with the website, rated its privacy practices and the perceived benefit resulting from data disclosure sig ni fi cantly higher, and also made considerably more purchases. We discuss the implications of these results and point out open research questions.