Willingness to share data: Contextual determinants of consumers' decisions to share private data with companies

Abstract

In the age of digitalization, customer and consumer data have become a valuable source of information for companies. However, to obtain these data, companies depend on peoples' willingness to share (WTS) their private data with them. By means of a large‐scale online experiment with more than 20,000 participants, we investigated the extent to which peoples' WTS private data is affected by contextual factors. We complement and extend previous research by (i) simultaneously addressing several contextual factors that companies can largely control themselves, (ii) comparing their relative impacts on WTS, and (iii) explicitly examining interactions between these contextual factors in addition to their specific univariate effects. Concretely, we investigate contextual factors, such as the type of data requested, the purpose for which the data are used, the industry sector a corresponding company belongs to, the type of compensation offered for the shared data, and the degree to which the data allows for personal identification. Our data suggest that all these factors do affect peoples' WTS significantly, while there are also multiple significant interaction effects between these contextual factors. For instance, we found that a better intuitive match between the core business a company is engaged in and the type of data that is requested, results in higher proportions of people who are willing to share the corresponding data with the corresponding company. Hence, companies may benefit from tuning their requests for consumer or customer data according to the specific context in which they operate.

Gen Z's personalization paradoxes: A privacy calculus examination of digital personalization and brand behaviors

“…that ultimately may explain continued (un)willingness to disclose personal data for personalization purposes (Ackermann et al, 2022).…”

“…Consumers have growing privacy concerns and suspicion regarding digital tracking technologies (Gironda & Korgaonkar, 2018; Li & Liu, 2017), taking steps to restrict tracking, hindering a brand's personalization efforts (Cloarec et al, 2022; Latvala et al, 2022). When consumers are unwilling to share personal data and take preemptive actions to limit data tracking, marketers have less information for creating personalized marketing efforts (Ackermann et al, 2022; Wanjugu et al, 2022). Incomplete data access increases the likelihood that consumers will experience even more non‐personalized digital communications, contributing to growing consumer frustration and consumer–brand disidentification (Anaza et al, 2021).…”

AI credibility and consumer-AI experiences: a conceptual framework

“…-[P9, Male,18years] This participant perceives that his data is being collected for useful purposes to serve him, which makes him willing to share more data with such an AI. Many participants emphasized that their willingness to share data with AI would depend on the purpose for which it is being collected (Ackermann et al, 2022). Consumers who feel connected and intimate with AI due to AI's openness and interactional justice may also share more data with AI (Ki et al, 2020;Labrecque, 2014).…”

“…This participant perceives that his data is being collected for useful purposes to serve him, which makes him willing to share more data with such an AI. Many participants emphasized that their willingness to share data with AI would depend on the purpose for which it is being collected (Ackermann et al. , 2022).…”

Community knowledge and the role of libraries and librarians in the current digital age

“…These include internal competition, team rewards, degree of formalisation and the relationship an individual has to the organisation. Trust is also an important variable in the willingness of people to share information (Ackermann et al , 2022). The extent to which people are trusted to provide information influences their willingness to provide such information.…”