This cartoon is about the “privacy paradox” — the phenomenon where people say that they value privacy highly, yet in their behavior relinquish their personal data for very little in exchange or fail to use measures to protect their privacy.
I recently wrote an article about the privacy paradox: The Myth of the Privacy Paradox, forthcoming 89 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. You can download it on SSRN for free.
Commentators typically make one of two types of arguments about the privacy paradox. On one side, privacy regulation skeptics contend behavior is the best metric to evaluate how people actually value privacy. Behavior reveals that people ascribe a low value to privacy or readily trade it away for goods or services. The argument often goes on to contend that privacy regulation should be reduced.
On the opposite side, other commentators argue that people’s behavior isn’t an accurate metric of preferences because behavior is distorted by biases and heuristics, manipulation and skewing, and other factors. People also demonstrate a strong tendency to favor immediate gratification, and this often leads to people giving up their data; the costs aren’t understood until it is far too late.
In contrast to both of these camps, I contend that the privacy paradox is a myth created by faulty logic. The behavior involved in privacy paradox studies involves people making decisions about risk in very specific contexts. In contrast, people’s attitudes about their privacy concerns or how much they value privacy are much more general in nature. It is a leap in logic to generalize from people’s risk decisions involving specific personal data in specific contexts to reach broader conclusions about how people value their own privacy.
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This post was authored by Professor Daniel J. Solove, who through TeachPrivacy develops computer-based privacy and data security training. He also posts at his blog at LinkedIn, which has more than 1 million followers.
Professor Solove is the organizer, along with Paul Schwartz, of the annual Privacy + Security Forum events.
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