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

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.