Unpicking the privacy paradox: can structuration theory help to explain location-based privacy decisions?

Social Media and Web 2.0 tools have dramatically increased the amount of previously private data that users share on the Web; now with the advent of GPS-enabled smartphones users are also actively sharing their location data through a variety of applications and services. Existing research has explored people's privacy attitudes, and shown that the way people trade their personal data for services of value can be inconsistent with their stated privacy preferences (a phenomenon known as the privacy paradox). In this paper we present a study into privacy and location sharing, using quantitative analysis to show the presence of the paradox, and qualitative analysis in order to reveal the factors that lie behind it. Our analysis indicates that privacy decision-making can be seen as a process of structuration, in that people do not make location-sharing decisions as entirely free agents and are instead heavily influenced by contextual factors (external structures) during trade-off decisions. Collectively these decisions may themselves become new structures influencing future decisions. Our work has important consequences both for the understanding of how users arrive at privacy decisions, and also for the potential design of privacy systems.