Data capitalism and the user: An exploration of privacy cynicism in Germany

Abstract

Ever since empirical studies found only a weak, if any, relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behavior, scholars have struggled to explain the so-called privacy paradox. Today, a number of theoretical arguments illuminate users’ privacy rationales, including the privacy calculus, privacy literacy, and contextual differentiations. A recent approach focuses on user resignation, apathy, or fatigue. In this piece, we concentrate on privacy cynicism, an attitude of uncertainty, powerlessness, mistrust, and resignation toward data handling by online services that renders privacy protection subjectively futile. We discuss privacy cynicism in the context of data capitalism, as a coping mechanism to address the tension between digital inclusion and a desire for privacy. Moreover, we introduce a measure for privacy cynicism and investigate the phenomenon based on a large-scale survey in Germany. The analysis highlights the multidimensionality of the construct, differentiating its relationships with privacy concerns, threat experience, Internet skills, and protection behavior.

Do Privacy Concerns About Social Robots Affect Use Intentions? Evidence From an Experimental Vignette Study

“…Users report high levels of privacy concerns but exhibit behavior that could be interpreted divergently, such as high levels of disclosure of personal information and low levels of privacy protection (Chen and Rea, 2004 ; Milne et al, 2009 ). While the individualistic notion of the privacy paradox and privacy self-management is increasingly contested (e.g., Obar, 2015 ; Lutz et al, 2020 ), we, nevertheless, took the privacy paradox as a useful starting for investigating social robots as an emerging but not yet widely adopted technology. Following up on earlier work, where we had tested the privacy paradox for social robots more generally and indeed found evidence for a privacy paradox (Lutz and Tamò-Larrieux, 2020 ), we wanted to check whether the privacy paradox between privacy concerns and intentions holds when confronted with a concrete robot.…”

Understanding the effects of conceptual and analytical choices on ‘finding’ the privacy paradox: A specification curve analysis of large-scale survey data

“…A second decision refers to the inclusion of control variables. Whereas some studies did not include control variables (e.g., Acquisti & Gross, 2006), others controlled for attitudes and intentions (e.g., Dienlin & Trepte, 2015), trust towards providers (e.g., Utz & Krämer, 2009), benefits of using online services (e.g., Dienlin & Metzger, 2016;Krasnova et al, 2012), privacy cynicism (Lutz et al, 2020), self-efficacy (Chen & Chen, 2015;Dienlin & Metzger, 2016), or privacy violation experiences (e.g., Awad & Krishnan, 2006). Many studies also controlled for socio-demographics (e.g., age, gender, education; Blank et al, 2014;Dienlin et al, 2019;Lutz & Strathoff, 2014).…”

“…If the relationship between privacy concerns and privacy concerns is indeed negligible in a particular context or population, we should refrain from denoting it as 'paradoxical' and inquire about reasons for this discrepancy instead. Among others, person-related factors such as perceived control, self-efficacy and low privacy literacy (Masur, 2020), privacy cynicism (Lutz et al, 2020), or heuristic-decision making processes (Gambino et al, 2016) could explain surprisingly small effect sizes.…”

The Right to Customization: Conceptualizing the Right to Repair for Informational Privacy

“…This phenomenon is also called the 'privacy paradox' [56]. The possible reasons for this phenomenon are manifold [55], and many authors are trying to explain it by means of concepts such as privacy fatigue [17] or privacy cynicism [50]. However, there are also authors who doubt that there is evidence for such a paradox to exist [44] or challenge the concept insofar as they argue that the paradox is not so paradoxical after all [80] [71].…”