“Privacy and Information Avoidance: An Experiment on Data-Sharing Preferences”, 2022 ():
[cf. et al 2012] There is a widespread intuition that people are inconsistent about protecting their privacy.
This paper presents an experiment that demonstrates that people engage in information avoidance when making privacy decisions.
People who are willing to pay nearly an hour’s worth of wages for privacy are also willing to give away their data for small monetary bonuses if given a chance to avoid seeing the consequences to privacy. Placebo tests confirm that the same behavior does not occur when people make choices between two monetary bonuses.
…By happenstance, an initial round of the experiment was run several weeks before the scandal became public…The paper also presents evidence on how this pattern changed during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
…In the experiment, participants who completed a survey decided whether to take it anonymously or after logging in with a Facebook account in exchange for a monetary bonus. When participants in a direct trade-off treatment faced a choice between a $0.63$0.52016 bonus and privacy, 64% of them refused to share their Facebook profiles in exchange for $0.63$0.52016. Indeed, when facing a standard price list tool to elicit preferences, the majority of participants in an elicitation treatment (who make close to minimum wage) were unwilling to share their Facebook data for $3.13$2.52016, and 40% refused offers of $6.25$52016.
However, when the privacy settings were veiled (but could be revealed costlessly and instantly with the click of a button, as in the moral-wiggle-room experiment in et al 2007), many participants kept themselves in the dark and opted for more money. Participants in a veiled trade-off treatment faced a choice between a $0.63$0.52016 bonus and a $0 bonus. They knew that one bonus would mean giving out their Facebook profiles, and they could click a button to check which option involved a loss in privacy. Most people (58%) did not click, and only 40% kept their Facebook profiles private. Hence, people who were willing to pay nearly an hour’s worth of wages to stay private were also able to take a $0.63$0.52016 bonus and hope for the best, even when learning about the privacy settings would have taken seconds.
Importantly, this same avoidance pattern did not hold when participants made a choice between two monetary bonuses rather than between money and privacy. In a placebo veiled trade-off treatment, participants faced the same experimental interface as in the veiled trade-off group, but the second option was also a monetary bonus. The size of the second monetary bonus was drawn from the distribution of willingness-to-pay (WTP) prices from participants in the elicitation treatment. When facing this choice, participants in the placebo veiled trade-off treatment clicked to reveal the second option 66% of the time, a rate statistically-significantly different from the reveal rate in the veiled trade-off group.