Trading with privacy: the price of personal information

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how users in an anonymous virtual environment react to an offer to trade in access to their social network profile. Design/methodology/approach – The experiment was conducted in Second Life (SL). Participants were offered varied sums of money in exchange for access to their Facebook profile, effectively undermining their anonymity. Findings – Even in an anonymous environment, money plays a role in users’ decisions to disclose their offline identity, but a closer look at the findings reveals that users also use deception to enjoy the benefits of the offer without paying the costs. The results illustrate three types of users according to the strategies they employ: abstainers, traders, and deceivers. Research limitations/implications – The implications to the field of online information disclosure lie at the ability to illustrate and distinguish between the different strategies users choose with regard to online information disclosure, as the study design si...

[1]  Hichang Cho,et al.  Deception in avatar-mediated virtual environment , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[2]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  What a tangled web we weave: lying backfires in location-sharing social media , 2013, CSCW.

[3]  M. Laroche,et al.  How to reduce perceived risk when buying online: The interactions between intangibility, product knowledge, brand familiarity, privacy and security concerns , 2014 .

[4]  David A. Huffaker,et al.  Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[5]  David Kirkpatrick,et al.  The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World , 2010 .

[6]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Misplaced Confidences , 2013, WEIS.

[7]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  When 25 Cents is Too Much: An Experiment on Willingness-To-Sell and Willingness-To-Protect Personal Information , 2007, WEIS.

[8]  Holtjona Galanxhi-Janaqi,et al.  Deception in cyberspace: A comparison of text-only vs. avatar-supported medium , 2007, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[9]  Stefano Taddei,et al.  Privacy, trust and control: Which relationships with online self-disclosure? , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[10]  Philipp Alexander Freund,et al.  “The (Real) World is not Enough:” Motivational Drivers and User Behavior in Virtual Worlds , 2012 .

[11]  Nicholas Christakis,et al.  The Taste for Privacy: An Analysis of College Student Privacy Settings in an Online Social Network , 2008, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[12]  Monica T. Whitty,et al.  Would I lie to you? Self-serving lies and other-oriented lies told across different media , 2008, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[13]  Katie Davis,et al.  Youth Identities in a Digital Age: The Anchoring Role of Friends in Young People’s Approaches to Online Identity Expression , 2014 .

[14]  Soojeong Lee,et al.  Can Speaking Activities of Residents in a Virtual World Make Difference to Their Self-Expression? , 2013, J. Educ. Technol. Soc..

[15]  Sheng-Chieh Huang,et al.  A private versus a public space: Anonymity and buying decorative symbolic goods for avatars in a virtual world , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[16]  Chris Jay Hoofnagle,et al.  Free: Accounting for the Costs of the Internet’s Most Popular Price , 2014 .

[17]  Sören Preibusch,et al.  Unwillingness to Pay for Privacy: A Field Experiment , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[18]  Hock-Hai Teo,et al.  The Value of Privacy Assurance: An Exploratory Field Experiment , 2007, MIS Q..

[19]  Avner Caspi,et al.  Online Deception: Prevalence, Motivation, and Emotion , 2006, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[20]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  What Is Privacy Worth? , 2013, The Journal of Legal Studies.

[21]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Facebook privacy settings: Who cares? , 2010, First Monday.

[22]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Privacy and Security of Personal Information - Economic Incentives and Technological Solutions , 2004, Economics of Information Security.

[23]  J. Burgoon,et al.  Interpersonal Deception Theory , 1996 .

[24]  Charles E. Naquin,et al.  The finer points of lying online: e-mail versus pen and paper. , 2010, The Journal of applied psychology.

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

[26]  Gilly Leshed,et al.  As Long as They Don’t Know Where I Live: Information Disclosure Strategies for Managing Identity in Second LifeTM , 2011 .

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

[28]  Timo Partala,et al.  Psychological needs and virtual worlds: Case Second Life , 2011, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[29]  Alastair R. Beresford,et al.  MockDroid: trading privacy for application functionality on smartphones , 2011, HotMobile '11.

[30]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  The Impact of Relative Standards on the Propensity to Disclose , 2012 .

[31]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Privacy and rationality in individual decision making , 2005, IEEE Security & Privacy.

[32]  Jeffrey T. Hancock,et al.  What Are Emotion Expressions For ? , 2011 .

[33]  Daniel J. Solove.  The Digital Person , 2022 .

[34]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Privacy in Interaction: Exploring Disclosure and Social Capital in Facebook , 2012, ICWSM.

[35]  Tibert Verhagen,et al.  Understanding users' motivations to engage in virtual worlds: A multipurpose model and empirical testing , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[36]  Julia Brande Earp,et al.  An experimental economics approach toward quantifying online privacy choices , 2006, Inf. Syst. Frontiers.

[37]  H. Nissenbaum.  A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online , 2011, Daedalus.

[38]  Jason Martin,et al.  Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships , 2008, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[39]  Lyn M. Van Swol,et al.  Deception, Detection, Demeanor, and Truth Bias in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Communication , 2015, Commun. Res..

[40]  Matthieu J. Guitton,et al.  Cross-modal compensation between name and visual aspect in socially active avatars , 2010, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[41]  Homa Atabakhsh,et al.  Criminal Identity Deception and Deception Detection in Law Enforcement , 2004 .

[42]  Sara B. Kiesler,et al.  The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft , 2007, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[43]  T. L. Taylor,et al.  Life in Virtual Worlds , 1999 .

[44]  Jeffrey T. Hancock,et al.  Separating Fact From Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles , 2008, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[45]  Hung-Yi Lu,et al.  Sensation-Seeking, Internet Dependency, and Online Interpersonal Deception , 2008, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[46]  Joshua C. Magee,et al.  The Interplay between Online and Offline Explorations of Identity, Relationships, and Sex: A Mixed-Methods Study with LGBT Youth , 2013, Journal of sex research.

[47]  Y. Chandra,et al.  Lead user innovation and entrepreneurship in the virtual world: A study of Second Life residents , 2012 .

[48]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Negotiating Privacy Concerns and Social Capital Needs in a Social Media Environment , 2011, Privacy Online.

[49]  Adam N. Joinson,et al.  Privacy, Trust, and Self-Disclosure Online , 2010, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[50]  K. Subrahmanyam,et al.  Digital Youth: The Role of Media in Development , 2010 .

[51]  Monika Taddicken,et al.  The 'Privacy Paradox' in the Social Web: The Impact of Privacy Concerns, Individual Characteristics, and the Perceived Social Relevance on Different Forms of Self-Disclosure1 , 2014, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[52]  P. Valkenburg,et al.  Online communication among adolescents: an integrated model of its attraction, opportunities, and risks. , 2011, The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine.

[53]  Kristen Campbell Eichhorn,et al.  An Exploration of Why People Participate in Second Life Social Support Groups , 2011, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[54]  Tom Boellstorff.  Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human , 2008 .

[55]  Michele D. Dickey.  Three-dimensional virtual worlds and distance learning: two case studies of Active Worlds as a medium for distance education , 2005, Br. J. Educ. Technol..