Digifesto

One result from earlier economic analysis is that in the cases where personal information is being used to judge the economic value of an agent (such as when they are going to be hired, or offered a loan), the market is divided between those that would prefer more personal information to flow (because they are highly qualified, or highly credit-worthy), and those that would rather information not flow.

I am naturally concerned about whether this microeconomic modeling has any sort of empirical validity. However, there is some corroborating evidence in the literature on privacy attitudes. Several surveys (see references) have discovered that people’s privacy attitudes cluster into several groups, those only “marginally concerned”, the “pragmatists”, and the “privacy fundamentalists”. These groups have, respectively, stronger and stronger views on the restriction of their flow of personal information.

It would be natural to suppose that some of the variation in privacy attitudes has to do with expected outcomes of information flow. I.e., if people are worried that their personal information will make them ineligible for a job, they are more likely to be concerned about this information flowing to potential employers.

I need to dig deeper into the literature to see whether factors like income have been shown to be correlated with privacy attitudes.

References

Ackerman, M. S., Cranor, L. F., & Reagle, J. (1999, November). Privacy in e-commerce: examining user scenarios and privacy preferences. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM conference on Electronic commerce (pp. 1-8). ACM.

B. Berendt et al., “Privacy in E-Commerce: Stated Preferences versus Actual Behavior,” Comm. ACM, vol. 484, pp. 101-106, 2005.

K.B. Sheehan, “Toward a Typology of Internet Users and Online Privacy Concerns,” The Information Soc., vol. 1821, pp. 21-32, 2002.