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ABSTRACT
What incentives and disincentives do Internet users weigh as they consider providing information to institutional actors such as government agencies and corporations online? Focus group participants list several benefits to sharing information including convenience, access to information, personalization, financial incentives, and more accurate health information, but also recognize that not all sharing may be in their interest. Disincentives to sharing include skepticism, distrust, and fears of discrimination. Decisions about sharing are related to the information type, the context in which information is revealed, and the institution to which they are – or think they are – providing information. Significantly, many participants were mistrustful of both governmental and corporate actors. Participants displayed awareness of privacy risks, but frequently mischaracterized the extent to which information could be aggregated and mined. They displayed resignation towards privacy violations, suggesting that they perceived little control over their ability to protect their privacy, which may influence their privacy behaviors. This calls into question the privacy calculus, as individuals misunderstand the risks of their information provision and do not believe opting out of information-sharing is possible.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Merck (Merck is known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) for its support. We greatly appreciate Robert Babich's assistance with data coding and the opportunity provided to him by the Institute for Policy Research Summer Research Assistant Program at Northwestern University. For assistance with data collection and transcription, we thank Elizabeth Hensley through Northwestern's Summer Research Opportunity Program, Devon Moore, Somi Hubbard, and Karina Sirota supported by Northwestern's Undergraduate Research Assistant Program. Marwick thanks the Data & Society Research Institute Fellows Program for providing the opportunity to work on this project. Hargittai appreciates the time made available through Northwestern's April McClain-Delaney and John Delaney Research Professorship for conducting this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Alice Marwick (PhD, New York University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include networked privacy; gender and social media; far-right internet cultures; and media manipulation and disinformation online. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013) and co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Social Media (2018). [email: [email protected]] (return).
Eszter Hargittai (PhD Sociology, Princeton University) is Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research of the University of Zurich. Her research looks at how people may benefit from their digital media uses with a particular focus on how differences in people's Web-use skills influence what they do online. She is working on a data base of survey questions concerning the study of people's Internet uses. She is editing the Handbook of Digital Inequality [email: [email protected]].
Notes
1. One can use Twitter without an account, but participants discussed using Twitter for self-promotional purposes which implied posting content and interacting with others on the site.
2. Whether healthcare.gov is governed by HIPAA became a political issue when US Representative Joe Barton, a Republican, claimed that the site violated the law in a House hearing on the Affordable Care Act. This complex issue is still under debate.