People do not ‘Value’ their Privacy and Security

A report from ChoiceStream discussed on Clickz underlines the point I have made before about many (perhaps most) people’s attitude to handing over their details.

Ask a question to citizens about whether they value their privacy and security and they will say yes, and often lobby legislators. But, when citizens are offered some small service they appear all to ready to exchange valuable and sensitive information.

The ChoiceStream study, based on US citizens, found that 62% of people were worried about divulging personal data to obtain personalised services, almost unchanged from the 63% in 2005. But the number of people willing to provide personal information to get personalised services was 57%, up from 46% in 2005. Similarly, the number of people willing to let sites track their clicks and purchases (including in https areas) was 43%, up from 32% in 2005).

The important lesson here is to be careful about the question we ask and the interpretation we put on answers. Choice based questions, where respondents make trade-offs are likely to correctly predict the sort of apparent paradox shown by the ChoiceStream report. People’s preference is for privacy, but the value they place on they preference is very low, and is readily traded-off to gain other more interesting benefits.