Using Crowd Sourcing to Analyze Consumers' Response to Privacy Policies of Online Social Network and Financial Institutions at Micro Level

Abstract

As it becomes easy and inexpensive to store huge amount of data, concerns about privacy are increasing as well. Although service providers have privacy policies, research shows that users rarely read privacy policies. As a result, there has been little work done on how consumers respond to individual segments of privacy policies, which is important for organizations when designing privacy policies. In this study, the authors break down privacy policies of two well-known social network companies (Facebook, Twitter) and financial institution (Bank of America) into simple segments. They then use crowd sourcing to analyze consumers' response to these policy segments. The authors ask questions on users' awareness, expectations, familiarity, and privacy concerns of these policy segments. The relationships between various factors such as demographic factors, data type, data flow and consumers' privacy concerns were also investigated. The authors conclude with guidelines and suggestions for improvement and ways to increase users' awareness of privacy policies.