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We propose that digital technologies and related data become increasingly prevalent and that, consequently, ethical concerns arise. Looking at four principal stakeholders, we propose corporate digital responsibility (CDR) as a novel concept. We define CDR as the set of shared values and norms guiding an organization's operations with respect to four main processes related to digital technology and data. These processes are the creation of technology and data capture, operation and decision making, inspection and impact assessment, and refinement of technology and data. We expand our discussion by highlighting how to managerially effectuate CDR compliant behavior based on an organizational culture perspective. Our conceptualization unlocks future research opportunities, especially regarding pertinent antecedents and consequences. Managerially, we shed first light on how an organization's shared values and norms regarding CDR can get translated into actionable guidelines for users. This provides grounds for future discussions related to CDR readiness, implementation, and success.

We had thought that our piece presented about as bleak a picture of the current privacy climate as could be imagined. These three superb commentaries, however, suggest that we may have fallen short of plumbing the depths of the current problem. Yet, if they are, possibly, even more despairing than we are about the current state of affairs, we read these commentaries as more optimistic about the prospects for an improvement of the situation.

An account of privacy’s evolutionary roots may hold lessons for policies in the digital age

There are diverse streams of empirical research attempting to study complex privacy behaviors in different scenarios. In this chapter, we connect those streams and present them under three themes: (1) individuals’ uncertainty about their own preferences as well as their uncertainty about the consequences of information disclosure; (2) the context-dependence of individuals’ concern, or lack thereof, about privacy; (3) the degree to which privacy concerns are malleable and prone to manipulations by commercial and government entities. Building on these themes, we discuss the role of public policy in the protection of privacy in the information age.

We review different streams of social science literature on privacy with the goal of understanding consumer privacy decision making and deriving implications for policy. We focus on psychological and economic factors influencing both consumers' desire and consumers' ability to protect their privacy, either through individual action or through the implementation of regulations applying to firms. Contrary to depictions of online sharing behaviors as careless, we show how consumers fundamentally care about online privacy, and present evidence of numerous actions they take to protect it. However, we also document how prohibitively difficult it is to attain desired, or even desirable, levels of privacy through individual action alone. The remaining instrument for privacy protection is policy intervention. However, again for both psychological and economic reasons, the collective impetus for adequate intervention is often countervailed by powerful interests that oppose it.

How does information about a person's past, accessed now, affect individuals' impressions of that person? In 2 survey experiments and 2 experiments with actual incentives, we compare whether, when evaluating a person, information about that person's past greedy or immoral behaviors is discounted similarly to information about her past generous or moral behaviors. We find that, no matter how far in the past a person behaved greedily or immorally, information about her negative behaviors is hardly discounted at all. In contrast, information about her past positive behaviors is discounted heavily: recent behaviors are much more influential than behaviors that occurred a long time ago. The lesser discounting of information about immoral and greedy behaviors is not caused by these behaviors being more influential, memorable, extreme, or attention-grabbing; rather, they are perceived as more diagnostic of a person's character than past moral or generous behaviors. The phenomenon of differential discounting of past information has particular relevance in the digital age, where information about people's past is easily retrieved. Our findings have significant implications for theories of impression formation and social information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record

The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk has suffered from slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participant non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk but providing access to new and more naïve populations. After surveying several options, we empirically examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). In two studies, we found that participants on both platforms were more naïve and less dishonest compared to MTurk participants. Across the three platforms, CF provided the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF's and comparable to MTurk's. ProA and CF participants were also much more diverse than participants from MTurk.

Among the many factors that can elicit privacy concerns and affect privacy behavior, some are sensorial: detecting the presence of others through our senses. Human beings may be wired to react to sensorial cues and rely, in part, on them to assess the privacy ramifications of their actions. Individuals may react to sensorial cues indicating the presence of others even when those cues do not carry relevant information about likely consequences of privacy choices – and thus, from a normative perspective, may not be expected to influence privacy concerns and resulting behaviors. In four experiments (N = 829), we examine the effect on privacy-relevant behavior (the disclosure of sensitive personal information) of four sensorial cues signaling the presence of other humans: proximity, visual, auditory, and olfactory, each signaling the presence of another person. Proximity and visual cues (Experiments 1 and 2) produced an inhibitory effect on intimate self-disclosures in an online survey – including when that presence does not and cannot materially affect participants’ risks or benefits associated with disclosure (Experiment 2). Auditory and olfactory cues (Experiments 3 and 4), however, did not. The findings point to a possible influence of sensorial (specifically, visual) cues on privacy behavior. We discuss the implications of the findings in the context of privacy and security decision making in a digital age, where physical cues human beings may have adapted to use for detection of threats may be absent, or even strategically manipulated by antagonistic third parties.

We test the hypothesis that increasing individuals’ perceived control over the release and access of private information—even information that allows them to be personally identified––will increase their willingness to disclose sensitive information. If their willingness to divulge increases sufficiently, such an increase in control can, paradoxically, end up leaving them more vulnerable. Our findings highlight how, if people respond in a sufficiently offsetting fashion, technologies designed to protect them can end up exacerbating the risks they face.

Advancements in information technology often task users with complex and consequential privacy and security decisions. A growing body of research has investigated individuals’ choices in the presence of privacy and information security trade-offs, the decision making hurdles affecting those choices, and ways to mitigate those hurdles. This article provides a multi-disciplinary assessment of the literature pertaining to privacy and security decision making. It focuses on research on assisting individuals’ privacy and security choices with soft paternalistic interventions that nudge users towards more beneficial choices. The article discusses potential benefits of those interventions, highlights their shortcomings, and identifies key ethical, design, and research challenges.

Even simpler or more usable privacy controls and notices might not improve users' decision-making regarding sharing of personal information. Control might paradoxically increase riskier disclosure by soothing privacy concerns. Transparency might be easily muted, and its effect arbitrarily controlled, through simple framing or misdirections.

This Review summarizes and draws connections between diverse streams of empirical research on privacy behavior. We use three themes to connect insights from social and behavioral sciences: people’s uncertainty about the consequences of privacy-related behaviors and their own preferences over those consequences; the context-dependence of people’s concern, or lack thereof, about privacy; and the degree to which privacy concerns are malleable—manipulable by commercial and governmental interests. Organizing our discussion by these themes, we offer observations concerning the role of public policy in the protection of privacy in the information age.

The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk exhibits slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participants’ non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk while providing access to new and more naive populations. We examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). We found that both platforms’ participants were more naive and less dishonest compared to MTurk. CF showed the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF’s and comparable to MTurk’s. We also found important demographic differences between the platforms. We discuss how researchers can use these findings to better plan online research, and their implications for the study of crowdsourcing research platforms.

Cryptographic access control tools for online social networks (CACTOS) allow users to enforce their privacy settings online without relying on the social network provider or any other third party. Many such tools have been proposed in the literature, some of them implemented and currently publicly available, and yet they have seen poor or no adoption at all. In this paper we investigate which obstacles may be hindering the adoption of these tools. To this end, we perform a user study to inquire users about key issues related to the desirability and general perception of CACTOS. Our results suggest that, even if social network users would be potentially interested in these tools, several issues would effectively obstruct their adoption. Participants in our study perceived that CACTOS are a disproportionate means to protect their privacy online. This in turn may have been motivated by the explicit use of cryptography or the fact that users do not actually share on social networks the type of information they would feel the need to encrypt. Moreover, in this paper we point out to several key elements that are to be considered for the improvement and better usability of CACTOS.