To share or not to share? The effect of privacy policies on the valuation of personal data and product choices online

To share or not to share? The effect of privacy policies on the valuation of personal data and product choices online

Supervisor

Ms Jasmin Mahmoodi, University of Geneva – Switzerland

Team

Communications Officer: Christoph Henking
Junior Researcher: Jitka Čurdová
Junior Researcher: Marvin Kunz
Junior Researcher: Karla Matić
Junior Researcher: Peter Mohr
Junior Researcher: Maja Vovko

 

Introduction

With the exponential growth of the digital economy, online services have permeated our everyday lives and users produce vast quantities of data. To use digital services and products, users often disregard privacy policies, which are usually written in permissive and legalistically confusing way making them lengthy to read and difficult to understand. As a result, users tend to outweigh the benefits and ignore the costs of using a certain service or product, causing a high acceptance of the policies, even though they run counter users’ privacy values. Applying insights from psychology and behavioural economics, this research aims to investigate valuation of personal data and privacy.