The Organized Ask: How Categorizing Data Requests Affects Consumers’ Willingness to Disclose Information

Firms often ask customers to divulge personal information. Two common strategies to encourage disclosure—emphasizing consumer benefits and highlighting data security measures—rely on communications that may backfire. This research examines an alternative strategy to increase disclosure—restructuring how data requests are presented. Drawing on categorization theory, we argue that grouping data requests into distinct categories (vs. presenting them as an uncategorized list) can make firms seem more professional, thereby increasing consumers’ perceptions of data security and willingness to disclose. This effect emerges even with uninformative categories but not when all the requests are placed into a single category. Our findings identify categorization as a simple tool that firms can deploy to increase voluntary disclosure of personal information. However, our work also raises ethical questions about data elicitation methods and how to better protect consumer privacy.