Investigating Privacy Attitudes and Behavior in Relation to Personalization

This article presents an experimental study of privacy-related attitudes and behaviors regarding a music recommender service based on two types of user modeling: personality traits and musical preferences. Contrary to prior expectations and attitudes reported by participants, personality traits are frequently disclosed to the system and other users, indicating that embedded modeling of user personality does not represent an acceptance barrier. Discrepancies between privacy attitudes and behaviors have been reported before in the context of e-commerce applications, but the corresponding studies could not exclude several conflicting hypotheses, such as participants expressing attitudes outside the context of specific privacy dilemmas and contact with researchers, which may have mitigated perceived privacy risks. Arguably, these are fundamental problems in empirical investigations into privacy that apply to most published works relating to privacy and user modeling. Measures to control these factors in this study are discussed, and methodological suggestions for future research are presented.

[1]  John Leubsdorf,et al.  Privacy and Freedom , 1968 .

[2]  S. Milgram.  Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View , 1975 .

[3]  J. Freedman,et al.  Conceptions of Crowding. (Book Reviews: Crowding and Behavior; The Environment and Social Behavior. Privacy, Personal Space. Territory, Crowding) , 1975 .

[4]  A. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. , 1992 .

[5]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  Design for Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing Environments , 1993, ECSCW.

[6]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Privacy in e-commerce: examining user scenarios and privacy preferences , 1999, EC '99.

[7]  Roger Clarke,et al.  Internet privacy concerns confirm the case for intervention , 1999, CACM.

[8]  Bettina Berendt,et al.  E-privacy in 2nd generation E-commerce: privacy preferences versus actual behavior , 2001, EC '01.

[9]  Anne Adams,et al.  Privacy in Multimedia Communications: Protecting Users, Not Just Data , 2001, BCS HCI/IHM.

[10]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  Personalized hypermedia and international privacy , 2002, CACM.

[11]  Marc Langheinrich,et al.  A Privacy Awareness System for Ubiquitous Computing Environments , 2002, UbiComp.

[12]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Privacy Mirrors: Understanding and Shaping Socio-technical Ubiquitous Computing Systems , 2002 .

[13]  S. Gosling,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES The Do Re Mi’s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences , 2003 .

[14]  M. Chignell,et al.  The Privacy Attitudes Questionnaire (PAQ): Initial Development and Validation , 2003 .

[15]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  Privacy through pseudonymity in user-adaptive systems , 2003, TOIT.

[16]  Nathaniel Good,et al.  Usability and privacy: a study of Kazaa P2P file-sharing , 2003, CHI '03.

[17]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  'I didn't buy it for myself' privacy and ecommerce personalization , 2003, WPES '03.

[18]  S. Gosling,et al.  A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains , 2003 .

[19]  S. Margulis.  On the Status and Contribution of Westin's and Altman's Theories of Privacy , 2003 .

[20]  P. Lunt,et al.  Privacy versus willingness to disclose in e-commerce exchanges: The effect of risk awareness on the relative role of trust and control , 2004 .

[21]  Boris E. R. de Ruyter,et al.  The Sensitivities of User Profile Information in Music Recommender Systems , 2004, PST.

[22]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Privacy in electronic commerce and the economics of immediate gratification , 2004, EC '04.

[23]  Clare-Marie Karat,et al.  Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce , 2004, Human-Computer Interaction Series.

[24]  James A. Landay,et al.  Personal privacy through understanding and action: five pitfalls for designers , 2004, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[25]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  I Didn't buy It for Myself , 2004, Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce.

[26]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  Impacts of User Privacy Preferences on Personalized Systems , 2004, Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce.

[27]  Ramnath K. Chellappa,et al.  Personalization versus Privacy: An Empirical Examination of the Online Consumer’s Dilemma , 2005, Inf. Technol. Manag..

[28]  Mare Langheinrich,et al.  Personal privacy in ubiquitous computing: Tools and system support , 2005 .

[29]  I. Ajzen,et al.  The Influence of Attitudes on Behavior , 2005 .

[30]  Marc Langheinrich,et al.  Personal Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing , 2005 .

[31]  Oliver Günther,et al.  Privacy in e-commerce: stated preferences vs. actual behavior , 2005, CACM.

[32]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Privacy and proportionality: adapting legal evaluation techniques to inform design in ubiquitous computing , 2005, CHI.

[33]  Tara Matthews,et al.  Location disclosure to social relations: why, when, & what people want to share , 2005, CHI.

[34]  John Karat,et al.  Privacy and HCI: methodologies for studying privacy issues , 2006, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[35]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  Generic User Modeling Systems , 2001, User modeling and user-adapted interaction.

[36]  Oliver Günther,et al.  RFID and the Perception of Control: The Consumer's View , 2005, IEEE Engineering Management Review.

[37]  I I Kvasova,et al.  Personality in culture, culture in personality , 2009 .