eSociety New Research: Privacy and Self-disclosure online

New research funded by an Economic and Social Research Council grant under the e-Society programme includes this project on "Privacy and Self-disclosure online".

Why are some people more willing to disclose personal information on the Internet than others? This latest e-Society project seeks the answer to this question by testing whether socio-legal approaches to understanding privacy offline can be applied to online behaviour.

Disclosing personal and often sensitive information is critical to developing trust between humans. Increasingly, we also need to disclose such information to relative strangers and online information systems.

The project will examine what determines people to disclose personal information online, the limits of that disclosure, and the consequences this has on the design of systems. Uniquely, the focus of the project will be on both the technology used to request personal information, and the social context in which the information is sought.

Modern technologies such as data mining pose a real threat to informational privacy. While concern about the privacy implications of new technology are nothing new, the development and linking of databases with biometrics, and the tension between the need for identification, protection of privacy and full participation in the e-society is a relatively new concern. This makes an understanding of the relations between privacy and the disclosure and use of personal information absolutely critical.

This project uses experimental social psychology methodology and psychometrics to investigate people’s willingness to disclose personal information. First, participants will complete measures of privacy concern and trust in online systems. Next, a series of experiments will examine the role of the audience / requestor characteristics, the design of disclosure-requiring websites and anonymity on disclosure behaviour. Finally, participants' earlier responses will be used to predict their later disclosure-based behaviour.

This project will be conducted by Adam Joinson, Tom Buchanan and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, from The Open University, University of Westminster and University of Zurich respectively. The project starts in January 2005 and will take a year to complete.

e-Society is the largest ever academic research programme to look at the impact of digital technologies particularly the internet, on our society and institutions. For more information on the e-Society programme, see the website linked below.

Associated Link: The eSociety programme

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