Not all data are created equal - Data sharing and privacy

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased our online presence and unleashed a new discussion on sharing sensitive personal data. Upcoming European legislation will facilitate data sharing in several areas, following the lead of the revised payments directive (PSD2), which enables payments data sharing with third parties. However, little is known about what drives consumers’ data sharing preferences, as these may differ according to the type of data, type of usage or type of firm using the data. Using a discrete-choice experiment among a representative group of Dutch consumers, we find that next to health data, people are hesitant to share their financial data on payments, wealth and pensions, compared to other types of consumer data. Second, consumers are especially cautious about sharing their data when they are not used anonymously. Third, consumers are more hesitant to share their data with BigTechs, webshops and insurers than they are with banks. Fourth, data sharing choices depend on financial rewards. Last, we show that attitudes towards data usage depend on personal characteristics, consumers’ digital skills, online behaviour and their trust in the firms using the data.

KEYWORDS:

• D12
• E42
• G21
• G22
• G23

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• data sharing
• banks
• BigTechs
• insurers
• webshops

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank colleagues at DNB, participants of the Bank of England Research Seminar, and one reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are grateful to Miquelle Marchand of Centerdata for collecting the data and for her help with the questionnaire. The views expressed in this paper are our own and do not necessarily reflect those of DNB, the Eurosystem or SEO Amsterdam Economics. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ European Commission (2020a). Data governance and data policies at the European Commission, accessed on 20 July 2022.

² European Commission (2020b). Digital Finance Strategy for the EU, accessed on 20 July 2022.

³ See, e.g. https://www.oaic.gov.au/consumer-data-right/what-is-the-consumer-data-right/.

⁴ For more information on the methodology, see Teppa and Vis (2012).

⁵ Using two-sided t-tests we tested whether respondents perceive the privacy sensitivity of the 10 data classes as equal or not. They consider the privacy sensitivity of most of the 10 data types as different (p < 0.01). They only perceive information about their social contacts and their contact details as equally sensitive (p = 0.67) as well as information about their personal characteristics and the location data of their smartphone (p = 0.11).

⁶ The relative trust ranking of banks, insurance firms and BigTechs of the Dutch is in line with the relative trust ranking of US citizens, see Van der Cruijsen, de Haan, and Jonker (2021) and Armantier et al. (2021).

⁷ Table A1 shows these choices for different sub samples.

⁸ The results are available upon request.

⁹ The results are available upon request.

¹⁰ The results are available upon request.

¹¹ The results are available upon request.