Attitudes on Data Use for Public Benefit: Investigating Context-Specific Differences Across Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom With a Longitudinal Survey Experiment

IF 5.5 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Social Media + Society Pub Date : 2024-11-30 DOI:10.1177/20563051241301202

Frederic Gerdon

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

With technological advances, governments and companies gain opportunities to collect data to provide public benefits. However, such data collections and uses need to fulfill ethical standards and comply with citizens’ privacy preferences, which may vary across several dimensions. The Comparative Privacy Research Framework suggests specific comparative dimensions that may shape such privacy-related perceptions. I propose how to integrate into this framework a specific meso-level perspective for concisely operationalizing data uses context-specifically: the privacy theory of contextual integrity, developed by Helen Nissenbaum. This article presents an empirical application of this approach by investigating specific data use scenarios across countries, while simultaneously considering temporal, international, and individual-level variation. To this end, an online survey experiment was conducted in three countries (Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom) in December 2022 and May 2023. In this experiment, respondents rated the appropriateness of fictitious data use scenarios. The scenarios varied by data type, data recipients, and conditions of data use. The results show that the effects of contextual parameters vary across countries to different degrees. Respondents react particularly sensitively to changes in data types, with health data being overall most accepted to be used. The relative acceptance of the data recipients clearly varies across countries. Country-level individualism is not consistently related to the desired level of control over data. These findings highlight the usefulness of contextual integrity to unmask meso-level, context-specific variations in privacy attitudes across countries. A meso-level perspective that operationalizes data uses according to contextual integrity can therefore inform comparative privacy research and privacy-related policymaking.

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来源期刊

Social Media + Society COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

9.20

自引率

3.80%

发文量

111

审稿时长

12 weeks

期刊介绍： Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.