Choice Architecture, Framing, and Cascaded Privacy Choices

Consumer privacy decision making is often layered: different interrelated decisions determine, together, a final privacy outcome and its associated benefits and costs. Layered privacy choices are particularly common online, where consumers are frequently tasked with multiple, sequential choices (such as first selecting a service’s privacy settings, and then engaging in privacy-sensitive behaviors) that will ultimately impact their privacy trade-offs. The layered nature of online privacy choices has important implications for models of privacy decision making and for consumers’ assumption of privacy risks. In this manuscript, we investigate how changes in the architecture of privacy choices affect an initial layer of privacy choice, and how that effect percolates through subsequent layers of privacy choices. Specifically, in a series of experiments, we investigate the impact of framing on participants’ initial privacy choices, and whether participants’ subsequent behaviors take account of, and neutralize, that impact. We find that various manipulations of decision frames, common to privacy contexts, can significantly alter individual choice of privacy protective options. Further, and importantly, we find that participants’ subsequent disclosure behavior stays constant despite the shifts in chosen privacy protections induced by choice framing. Implications for privacy decision research as well as policy makers are discussed.