Unpacking privacy: Valuation of personal data protection.

Information about individual behaviour is collected regularly by organisations. This information has value to businesses, the government and third parties. It is not clear what value this personal data has to consumers themselves. Much of the modern economy is predicated on people sharing personal data, however if individuals value their privacy, they may choose to withhold this data unless the perceived benefits of sharing outweigh the perceived value of keeping the data private. One technique to assess how much individuals value their privacy is to ask them whether they might be willing to pay for an otherwise free service if paying allowed them to avoid sharing personal data. Our research extends previous work on factors affecting individuals' decisions about whether to share personal data. We take an experimental approach and focus on whether consumers place a positive value on protecting their data by examining their willingness to share personal data in a variety of data sharing environments. Using five evaluation techniques, we systematically investigate whether members of the public value keeping their personal data private. We show that the extent to which participants value protecting their information differs by data type, suggesting there is no simple function to assign a value for individual privacy. The majority of participants displayed remarkable consistency in their rankings of the importance of different types of data through a variety of elicitation procedures, a finding consistent with the existence of stable individual privacy preferences in protecting personal data. We discuss our findings in the context of research on the value of privacy and privacy preferences.

Trust in the smart home: Findings from a nationally representative survey in the UK.

Businesses in the smart home sector are actively promoting the benefits of smart home technologies for consumers, such as convenience, economy and home security. To better understand meanings of and trust in the smart home, we carried out a nationally representative survey of UK consumers designed to measure adoption and acceptability, focusing on awareness, ownership, experience, trust, satisfaction and intention to use. We analysed the results using theories of meanings and acceptability of technologies including semiotics, social construction of technology (SCOT) and sociotechnical affordance. Our findings suggest that the meaning and value proposition of the smart home have not yet achieved closure for consumers, but is already foregrounding risks to privacy and security amongst the other meaning-making possibilities it could afford. Anxiety about the likelihood of a security incident emerges as a prominent factor influencing adoption of smart home technology. This factor negatively impacts adoption. These findings underline how businesses and policymakers will need to work together to act on the sociotechnical affordances of smart home technology in order to increase consumers' trust. This intervention is necessary if barriers to adoption and acceptability of the smart home are to be addressed now and in the future.

Is Allocation Affected by the Perception of Others' Irresponsible Behavior and by Ambiguity?

The article examines how the perception of others' irresponsible behavior and ambiguity regarding probabilities affect allocation among potential beneficiaries. To elicit these views, we conducted a survey where the participants were first asked to make an allocation of a fixed sum of money between a hereditary cancer, where chance plays a central role, and a lifestyle-related cancer, where individual lifestyle decisions are more important. Our estimation results show that a substantial share of the respondents allocate significantly more to the hereditary cancer. This may indicate that these respondents care about others' irresponsible behavior. Then, we elicited perceptions of cancer hazards in the form of imprecise probabilities and examined the interplay between allocating behavior and risk perceptions. Finally, we investigated the effects of various socioeconomic characteristics, and of awareness of highly publicized cancer cases, on respondents' allocations.