Privacy, Trust, and Self-Disclosure Online

Joinson, Adam, Ulf-Dietrich Reips, Tom Buchanan, and Carina Schofield. "Privacy, Trust, and Self-Disclosure Online." Human-Computer Interaction 25, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2010): 1-24.

The article starts off discussing how disclosure, required in order to utilize various internet websites, creates privacy issues for online users. The functionality at the heart of many social websites requires users to disclose personal information to take advantage of the functionality of the sites. Some technology ,at its essence, discloses information about users – one such example is uploading photographs that have location information connected to them. Other examples are websites and online databases that share information, in some cases disseminating personal information about individuals without their knowledge.

Although the authors provide evidence that companies who address privacy concerns are generally more successful, they also maintain that there isn’t an irrefutable link between individuals’ concerns about privacy and their behavior online. The authors attribute this partly to the fact that users seldom read or understand privacy policies, and the privacy policies themselves are not user friendly.

The authors also discuss trust and assert that the willingness to disclose information on line is dependent on how much the individual trusts the party who they are disclosing information to. Some proof in this section of the article was rather outdated, surprisingly from the 1970’s and 1980’s. More recent proof was offered, though, and the authors outline a couple of relationships relative to online privacy and self-disclosure, claiming that the correlation between the two factors is mediated by trust. This is interpreted to mean that there isn’t a direct relationship between privacy and behavior. Instead, the two relationships hypothesized to exist are between privacy and trust and then between trust and behavior.

The authors perform two studies to test their theories, one that measures dispositional privacy, perceived privacy, and trust; the second one is an experiment whereby privacy and trust are manipulated and tested to determine if there is a moderation effect.

As a result of these studies, the authors find a way to measure the relationship between users’ privacy concerns and their behavior, though in the past there was no conclusive evidence reflecting a correlation between these two variables. The results of the two studies also explain why, even though individuals may seem very concerned about privacy, their online behavior may not necessarily reflect that. The authors maintain this is because an individual’s general attitude towards online privacy may not be indicative of their attitude and behavior in dealing with specific situations they may confront online. Further results show that a strong relationship between privacy and trust exists illustrated by a negative correlation between the two variables, further demonstrating why specific situations cause users to behave in contrast to their general attitudes towards privacy.

The authors recommend, for organizations and individuals, avoiding extremes on either end of the spectrum for these two elements - privacy and trust.

The article presented very substantial evidence and data analyses for the hypotheses presented. It also exposed the complexities involved in a study attempting to understand computer users’ online behavior. Instead of trying to oversimplify their research, the authors take on what they believe to be complicated and indirect relationships between privacy and online behavior and discover the variables they originally thought were not correlated could, in fact, be measured.

This article is very relevant to my study and provides new evidence in my literature review that trust is a major factor in determining people’s behavior online – and that trust is very situational.