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ABSTRACT
Although research evidence shows that people have strong concerns about their privacy online, this does not necessarily mean that they do not share their personal information in varying online relationships. This paper presents New Zealand-based empirical research findings into people’s actual online information-sharing behaviours rather than their attitudes: the motivations, extent, and conditions under which individuals share their personal information in varying online relationships with commercial providers, with government, and on social networking sites. A grounded theory methodology and an abductive analysis were used to identify patterns in the findings and construct a new taxonomy of online information-sharing behaviours: contrary to existing taxonomies, all participants in this study are very privacy aware and make quite deliberate choices about what personal information they share online, with whom, to what extent, and under what circumstances. Four distinctive classifications of people’s online information-sharing behaviours were derived from this study: privacy pragmatists, privacy victims, privacy optimists, and privacy fatalists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Professor A. Miriam B. Lips is Professor of Digital Government in the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington [email: [email protected]].
Dr Elizabeth Eppel is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington [email: [email protected]].
Notes
1. This research was undertaken by the authors from 2013 until 2014 and received financial support from the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs.