Exposing the Privacy Paradox as a Chimera

Abstract: Research on online privacy protection is plagued by an apparent paradox: Although people voice concern about their information privacy, they do little to preserve it. Instead of relying solely on people’s opinions (i.e., verbally expressed privacy concerns), we propose an information-privacy-protection-motivation measure that makes use of the “costs” of privacy-protective behaviors. This measure is grounded in the notion that the more people have done to protect their information privacy (i.e., the more “costs” they have incurred), the more important information privacy is for them as a motive for their actions. In two studies, our measure showed high reliability and a good fit with participants’ responses. Integrating opinions about privacy protection into our new measure showed that opinions are indicative of the same motivation to protect one’s privacy but come with comparably lower costs. Our new information-privacy-protection-motivation measure additionally accounted for manifest behavior (i.e., the effective disclosure of personal information). In Study 2 ( N 2 = 1,418), we replicated Study 1 ( N 1 = 435) with a refined measure. Considering the usually low behavioral costs of people’s voiced concerns and the often-higher costs of both self-reported and manifest actions thus exposes the privacy paradox as a chimera.