The validation of the Perceived Surveillance Scale

Abstract

Data-driven practices, such as personalized communication, computational advertising, and algorithmic decision making, are now commonplace. However, they have been criticized for (mis)uses of personal data and invasions of people’s privacy. Recently, scholars have started to examine the concept of perceived surveillance to obtain more insight into the perceptions and effectiveness of data-driven communication. Despite the growing research interest in perceived surveillance, there is no validated scale to measure this concept. This study aimed to validate the Perceived Surveillance Scale. The reliability and validity of the scale were tested in two surveys (N = 137 and N = 1,008) and one experiment (N = 527). In all three studies, the scale showed good reliability. Regarding construct validity, the results showed that, as expected, the Perceived Surveillance Scale was positively related to privacy concerns, privacy risk perception, perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, creepiness, surveillance concerns, and perceived personalization. In line with the predictions, the scale was negatively related to personalization attitudes. The Perceived Surveillance Scale can assess differences in perceptions of or responses to data-driven communication in different communication domains.

Balancing perceptions of targeting: An investigation of political microtargeting transparency through a calculus approach

“…Prior work shows that in the case of behavioral advertising, persuasion knowledge affects privacy risk perceptions. While existing research shows that if people know that they are exposed to personalized messages, this affects privacy risks [54] or that users even feel that these messages are intrusive or creepy, our results did not align with this [23,53]. Moreover, we would like to point out that our result aligns with the novel work by Dobber and colleagues, who also did not find a relationship between exposure to transparency information and users' privacy concerns [36].…”

“…Other work shows that higher levels of personalization lead to higher perceived creepiness of advertisements [50]. Recent work validating a scale on perceived surveillance concerning personalization effects found that users experience creepiness, concerns about surveillance, perceptions of privacy risks overall, and privacy concerns [53]. In addition, other work found that in the case of data-driven OBA, persuasion knowledge, on which the concept of targeting knowledge is built, positively affects privacy risks, which could be considered as the cost side of the privacy calculus theory [54].…”

Algilanan Ki̇şi̇selleşti̇rmeni̇n Marka Kullanim Ni̇yeti̇ Üzeri̇ndeki̇ Etki̇si̇

“…The scales used in the research are as follows: 1) Perceived personalization scale, (Srinivasan et al, 2002): 5 statements 2) Perceived surveillance scale (Segijn et al, 2022): 4 statements 3) Privacy concern scale (Baek & Morimoto, 2012): 6 statements 4) Brand usage intention scale (Yoo & Donthu, 2001;Hollebeek et al, 2014): 4 statements…”