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Exploring People's Conceptions of Privacy in the Virtual World
Lara Zwarun, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of Texas at Arlington
Box 19107
Arlington, TX 76019
817.272.5174
[log in to unmask]
Mike Z. Yao, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Communication
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020
(805) 893-4479
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Please direct all correspondence to the first author.
Submitted to the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of the
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
for the 2005 conference in San Antonio, TX
April 1, 2005
EXPLORING PEOPLE'S CONCEPTIONS OF PRIVACY IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD
Abstract
This study uses Q-methodology to explore whether five dimensions of
privacy identified from extant literature are meaningful ways of
organizing people's subjective concerns about online
privacy. Results indicate that a majority of people display a
similar pattern when asked to organize the statements based on
spatial and psychological views of privacy, but not on the
informational, rights, and boundary management perspectives,
suggesting that interpretation of privacy can be subjective and
requires more examination.
By far, the most commonly studied online privacy issue is consumer
concern (e.g., Federal Trade Commission, 2000; UCLA Center for
Communication Policy, 2000). Hoffman, Novak, and Peralta (1999) found
that more than 90% of Internet users either have declined to provide
personal information or have fabricated information due to online
privacy concerns. A recent analysis of over sixteen opinion polls
taken between 1998 and 2002 reveals that nearly two third of
respondents were either "very" or "somewhat" concerned about privacy
when they go on the Internet (Docter & Metzger, 2003).
Although many recent studies of online privacy provide useful and
generalizable descriptive findings about the scope and nature of the
public's online privacy concerns, research on this topic, overall,
suffers from a number of conceptual, theoretical and methodological
limitations. As a result many critical research questions about
online privacy remain unanswered.
Conceptually, several studies have examined the nature of online
privacy concerns. For example, Wang, Lee, & Wang (1998) suggest that
Internet marketing could raise privacy concerns in the areas of
access, solicitation, collection, monitoring, analysis, transfer, and
storage of consumer information. The Federal Trade Commission (2000)
identified five core principles of fair information practices—notice,
choice, access, security, and enforcement—that Sheehan and Hoy (2000)
extended as the major dimensions of privacy concerns among Internet
users (see also Docter & Metzger, 2003). However, research on online
privacy does not adequately address any of these issues.
Moreover, because specific issues such as public outcry and policy
advocacy drive most online privacy studies, there is no overarching
theoretical framework that guides this body of research (Harper &
Singleton, 2001). The multiple perspectives of privacy offered by
philosophers, legal scholars, and social scientists further
complicate this matter. For example, one researcher can make a legal
consideration of violations of the right to privacy, while another
may follow the social scientific model by examining users'
perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors relating to privacy issues in
the online environment. In this case, privacy is defined as specific
acts by the first researcher, but as a psychological need that may
vary from individual to individual by the second researcher. Without
an overarching perspective to bridge these two intellectual
traditions, the knowledge generated by these two researchers may not
be easily synthesized in order to gain a fuller understanding of
online privacy as a social phenomenon.
Methodologically, most online privacy studies rely on opinion polls
and survey methods. Harper and Singleton (2001) point out that most
online privacy surveys include many different concerns under the same
heading of "privacy" without informing respondents about all the
facets of the issue. Thus, results from these surveys are difficult
to interpret. Further, surveys are unlikely to accurately reflect
consumers' true preferences and concerns of privacy because
respondents often do not have enough time to consider the complex
issues and trade-offs involved in this topic (Harper & Singleton,
2001). Also, while public opinion polls are useful in revealing the
percentage of users who have privacy concerns, there is very little
information about who is concerned about what under what
circumstances and why.
An Apparent Paradox
Although Internet users report high levels of concern for online
privacy, they have very little knowledge of marketing practices that
may violate privacy specifically, and little knowledge of online
privacy policies as a whole (Dommeyer & Gross, 2003). Moreover, while
consumers claim to be fairly well informed about privacy protection
strategies, they do not often adopt these strategies. Consumer use
of privacy protection software, consumer attention to privacy
statements, and the incidence rate of taking measures to increase
privacy such as prohibiting "cookies" is very low (Dommeyer & Gross,
2003, Tavani, 2000). The apparent discrepancy between high levels of
online privacy concerns and the lack of actual self-protection
behaviors among users of the Internet limits the development of more
useful privacy protection tools, and severely hinders policymakers'
ability to offer effective legal protections of online privacy.
An insight into why this discrepancy may occur comes from Tavani's
(2000) examination of how users of the Internet use privacy-enhancing
technologies (PET) to protect their online privacy. Tavani (2000)
found that although many PETs are designed to give Internet users
control over the revelation of personal information, much education
is needed before these technologies can be truly effective due to the
lack of user knowledge of how to implement these technologies.
This is not necessarily just confusion about the technologies
themselves: it is possible that people have difficulty applying
conceptions of privacy, space and protection developed over years of
experience with the physical world to the virtual world. The term
privacy has been loosely used in many social contexts to describe an
array of activities (Solove & Rotenberg, 2003), and there is no
research explicitly examining how the public defines online
privacy. For example, researchers rarely ask: How do users of the
Internet understand spatial metaphors in cyberspace? How do these
metaphors relate to privacy issues? What kind of legal rights do
users believe they have with regard to online privacy? Until it is
known how people answer questions like, what turf am I defending,
what information is getting out, do I have a legal right to keep it
private, and do I care if it becomes public, it will be difficult to
explain the consistent paradox between people's stated concern over
online privacy and their failure to use privacy protection
technologies to maintain their privacy.
Five Components of Privacy
Although the concept of privacy has been defined and studied in many
different ways, almost all views of privacy, at the broadest level,
include one of five basic components: the spatial component—privacy
as separation of private and public physical spaces; the
informational component—privacy as a matter of protecting identity,
personal information, and decision making; the rights or personal
liberty component—people have a right to privacy and should be able
to protect it; the need component—psychologically people desire
privacy; and boundary management—the extent to which individuals are
able to control the spatial and informational aspects of their
private lives. Current research on online privacy fails to
incorporate these five dimensions into an overarching theoretical
perspective.
The first component recognizes that privacy is considered to be a
"spatial" problem in the physical world. Here, thinking about
privacy refers to separating the "private" and "public" space, or
"spheres" of privacy that may literally surround the
individual. Here also is a concern for maintaining and protecting
private land or property.
The second component reflects a respect for private information,
thinking, writing and making decisions free of interference from the
government or other people and the control of intellectual "property"
or information and ideas. The third component is the rights
component. Do I have a right to privacy? Do others think I have a
right to privacy? The fourth component is the psychological
component. How much privacy do I need? Do I care if this
information is made public? The fifth component is boundary
management. What boundary is being broken, what space is being
invaded, what information is being taken and how can I manage these
intrusions? Privacy protection software is primarily addressed to the
last component, although it is not known if this is a common
conceptualization of privacy for the public.
Very little empirical research has been aimed at investigating the
five dimensions of privacy in the online environment. However,
communication technologies, such as the Internet, challenge these
earlier definitions and make it necessary to ask whether digital
technologies require a new understanding of privacy. With respect to
the Internet, it is not enough for existing views and legal
protections of privacy to simply be adapted. The unique
characteristics of today's communication technologies, particularly
the Internet, present new challenges to all five components of the
notion of privacy. These components must be applied to the concept of
online privacy so that a theoretical perspective can be gained.
The spatial component. Nearly all influential thinkers within the
Western philosophical tradition have made some sort of distinction
between "public" and "private" spaces (Elshtain, 1995). The
assumption generally has been that there is a boundary between the
private realm and the public realm. For example, Aristotle saw
private homes and households as the private sphere, or "oikos," as
contrasted with the public sphere defined by political activities
(DeCew, 1997; Swanson, 1992).
Violations of privacy in the physical world usually involve the
intrusion of some physical boundary that separates one's private
space and public space. While the boundaries can be the physical
walls surrounding one's home, an arbitrary property line drawn by
land developers, or even an invisible buffer zone around one's body,
what is considered private can, nevertheless, be measured by spatial
properties of the physical world (e.g., length, distance, and area).
However, this spatial metaphor may be inadequate when it is extended
to the digital universe because of a lack of spatial measurement in
the virtual environment of the Internet, where boundaries are not
observable and cannot be measured in the usual way. In cyberspace,
there are no physical walls, there are no landmarks, and there is no
differentiation between where one person's space begins and another's ends.
Despite this, programmers have devised metaphors based on the
physical world such as "firewalls" and "cookies" to encourage
computer users to adopt protection technologies to defend their
boundaries or turf. But people may not really understand the
metaphors. For example, computer users could "build" some sort of
metaphoric "firewall" around an arbitrary space in cyberspace, but
what this really means is to activate certain features of software to
enable it to protect information. It is not really a wall, you cannot
see it, and therefore this spatial metaphor for privacy may not work
very well because users will not be able to actually define a space
around which they should build a "wall."
Similarly, while "cookies" are literally strings of computer code
deposited on a computer's hard drive, they are often explained as
being similar to a camera in a room watching people's behavior. The
spatial metaphor here is supposed to invoke a sense of physical
protection so that people might turn on the protection features in a
Web browser to reject "cookies". However, if users cannot conceive of
the existence of a "room" in which "cameras" (cookies) are installed,
they won't be able to protect themselves.
In summary, using spatial metaphors to understand online privacy
issues may not work because people do not know how to think about
their territory and how to defend it in virtual space. They may not
know how to defend their boundaries when the boundaries are
informational rather than physical.
The informational component. A second component that can be found in
most definitions of privacy concerns the degree to which individuals
have controls over their personal information and their private
lives. Informational privacy relates to an individual's ability to
determine when, how, and what private information about the self is
released to another person (Westin, 1967) or an organization.
Protections of private information have usually been treated as a
moral and ethical issue instead of a matter of financial interest
(Solove & Roterberg, 2003).
However, the informational component of privacy is challenged by new
communication technologies, as well as the increasing commercial
value of personal information (Leino-Kilpi et al., 2001). The main
concerns here are with access to personal data stored in centralized
locations (e.g., computer databases) and the extent to which they
should be protected. Today, personal information is a commodity that
is bought and sold by businesses. Whole industries and attendant
bureaucracies have formed solely to collect and distribute sensitive
information, such as medical records, personal shopping habits and
credit histories that individuals once viewed as under their
exclusive control. The commercial gains associated with one's
identity are no longer limited to the advertising value as
conceptualized by the appropriation privacy tort. Marketing companies
and other commercial entities spend millions of dollars to gather
personal information from consumers.
With the enormous amounts of personal information stored in computer
databases, the ease, speed, and scale of information exchange allowed
by the Internet, and the commercial value the data possess (e.g.,
Kornblum, J., July 22nd, 1997), a traditional sense of control of
one's private information in this new environment is grossly
inadequate. As such, it may be that individuals who fail to
effectively use privacy enhancing technologies are those who do not
know what information they want to protect, through what means this
information is collected on the Internet, and to what extent this
information is valued by others.
The right/liberty component. The third component of privacy is the
right or liberty component. The legal protections of privacy in the
U.S. can at best be described as haphazard, and while there is an
ongoing effort by legislators to expand the right of privacy to the
Internet (Roternberg, 2003; Turkinton & Allen, 1999), the four
privacy torts are geared toward very specific issues in the physical
world and are not easily translated to the online environment. For
example, the intrusion privacy tort assumes the existence of an
observable space, physical or psychological, that is deemed to be
private. In the digital world, the difficulty in defining such a
space limits the usefulness of this tort in the online environment.
Federal statutory bodies have enacted a great number of statutes and
regulations that protect informational privacy, but these statutes
are confusing and are usually narrowly tailored to guard against
specific types of businesses collecting or exchanging specific types
of information (e.g., Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, Cable
Communications Policy Act of 1984, Video Privacy Protection Act of
1988, Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, etc.). Furthermore,
there is no consensus among lawmakers and private entities as to what
personal information is private and what is not. The ease of data
sharing and matching also allows new information about a person to be
created by merging data from seemingly non-private sources, adding to
the problem. Therefore, an average consumer is unlikely to have
extensive legal knowledge about his/her privacy rights offered by the
legal system.
In order to protect one's privacy effectively using privacy enhancing
technologies, a person must ask: Do I have a right to privacy? Do
others think I have a right to privacy? What kind of information
collection is considered legal? To what extent do the privacy laws
protect me? Difficulty in answering these questions may be
reflected in a failure to effectively adopt privacy protections technologies.
The psychological need component. Extensive research has been
devoted to individuals' need to preserve their privacy in the
physical world. Social scientists have identified physical,
psychological, informational, and social dimensions of individuals'
psychological need for privacy, each of which has been examined
closely through empirical observations (Burgoon, 1982; Parrott,
Burgoon, Burgoon, & LePoire, 1989).
The psychological dimension of privacy concerns the ability of human
beings to control cognitive and affective inputs and outputs, to form
values, and the right to determine when, with whom, and how to share
one's thoughts or emotions (Burgoon, 1982). For example, Westin
(1967) posits that people have a need for privacy that, in concert
with other needs, helps them adjust emotionally to daily life with
other people. Privacy, according to Westin (1967), fulfills one's
need for personal autonomy, emotional release, self-evaluation, and
limited and protected communication.
Not only is very little known about what Internet users mean by
online privacy, it cannot be assumed that every computer user has the
same level of psychological need for privacy. Before users can
effectively adopt privacy protection technologies they need to ask:
How much privacy do I need? Do I care if this information is made
public? Existing studies of consumers' concerns do not provide
adequate understanding of the relationship between psychological
characteristics (e.g., need for privacy, personal space,
territoriality, etc.) and concerns about online privacy. The
difference between those who adopt privacy enhancing technologies and
those who don't can be that those users who adopt have greater
psychological need for privacy. An important variable here is motivation. .
The boundary management component. Overall, research in social
science would suggest that privacy can be generally defined as a
physical or psychological boundary that separates a person's
perceived private domain from the public domain (Altman, 1975; Buss,
2001). Thus, a state of privacy can be achieved through processes of
boundary management (Buss, 2001). Effectively managing personal
boundaries requires answering questions such as, what boundary is
being broken? What space is being invaded? What information is
being taken? How can I manage these intrusions?
One of the most well-established boundary management strategies in
psychological research is the process of self-disclosure (Buss, 2001;
Caldwell & Peplau, 1982; Franzoi & Davis, 1985; Mikulincer & Nachson,
1991). Another well-studied boundary management process concerns how
individuals manage personal space. In this sense, the privacy
boundary refers to the psychological border between one's self and
the outer world (Hall, 1966, Sommer, 1959). In the physical reality,
self-disclosure and personal space management rely on basic social
activities that we can all do with very little conscious effort.
As stated earlier, the Federal Trade Commission (2000) identified
five core principles of fair information practice: notice, choice,
access, security, and enforcement. Notice refers to information about
what is collected, how it is collected, its purpose and disclosure to
third parties. Choice refers to opportunity that allows individuals
to choose not to have information used or disclosed. Access refers to
the ability to access one's own personal data. Security concerns
precautions against misuse of data. Enforcement concerns mechanisms
for assuring compliance. Sheehan and Hoy (2000) extended these five
principles as the major dimensions of privacy concerns among Internet
users (see also Docter & Metzger, 2003).
These concerns all relate to the issue of boundary management in the
online environment. They are similar to boundary management
strategies in the physical world. Individual users want to maintain
their ability to choose what information, to whom and when they want
to disclose, and some sort of guarantee from the target of
self-disclosure that their personal information would be kept safely.
In the virtual world, however, protections of individual privacy
involve conscious effort and the use of technologies. The difference
between those who adopt privacy enhancing technologies and those who
don't may be that savvy users of these technologies are more aware of
the boundary management strategies that exist online.
Rationale
The goal of the current study is to determine whether or not the
five components of privacy extracted from past literature are
meaningful ways of organizing people's subjective concerns about
online privacy. We argue that if these five components of privacy
are meaningful ways of thinking about individual's online privacy
concerns, then people should be able to organize various online
privacy concerns in ways that are consistent with these components.
Specifically, we predict that participants will evaluate statements
about online privacy in similar ways if they are required to organize
them by instructions that are consistent with these components.
Method
Overview of Analysis
Q-method is a controlled technique for revealing structures of
subjectivity. However, unlike other qualitative techniques for
analyzing subjective data, Q-method is deeply rooted in the tradition
of quantitative analysis due to its involvement with factor analysis
(Brown, 1996). This technique takes advantage of powerful statistical
tools typically used by quantitative researchers to examine people's
subjective understandings of the surrounding world. Unlike most of
the common quantitative methods, such as traditional ranking opinion
surveys, Q-method is less concerned with comparing patterns between
different groups than it is with determining what these patterns are
and determining their underlying structures.
As Stephenson (1935), the inventor of the Q-methodology, notes,
traditional quantitative methodologies deal with a selected
population of n individuals, each of whom has been measured in m
tests, whereas Q-methodology refers to a population of n different
tests (or essays, pictures, traits or other measurable material),
each of which is measured or scaled by m individuals. As such,
statistical analysis of Q-sort data is not performed by variable,
trait, or statement, but rather by person. People correlate to others
with similar opinions based on their Q-sorts. Q-methodology results
in the grouping of expressed opinion profiles based on the
similarities and differences in which the statements are arranged by
each participant (Brown, 1993; McKeown & Thomas, 1988)
The current study is comprised of five separate Q-sort tasks, each
with a sorting instruction that reflects a component of privacy
(e.g., spatial, informational, etc.). For each Q-sort task in the
current study, participants' rank-ordered sorts of statements are
transformed into an array of numerical data. A by-person factor
analysis determines the factors that represent clusters of
participants with similar opinions. In the practice of Q-methodology,
people who are associated with one factor have something in common
that differentiates them from those who are associated with the other factors.
In traditional Q-sort studies, after clusters of participants are
identified within each Q-sort task, a factor score for each statement
is calculated. The factor scores reveal the level of relevancy that
each statement receives within each of the identified participant
clusters. The interpretation of factors in Q-methodology uses
statement scores rather than factor loadings. However, in the present
study, the primary goal is not to interpret and categorize various
views of online privacy. Instead, we are mainly concerned with
whether or not the five components of privacy can be used to organize
online privacy concerns in meaningful and consistent ways without
sacrificing people's subjectivity.
Participants
This study used an extensive person-sample (McKeown & Thomas, 1988),
meaning that multiple people sorted the same group of statements (the
Q-sample) using one of 5 similar sets of instructions. 87 students
were recruited from both upper- and lower-division classes offered in
a Communication Department by offering extra credit for their
participation, 80 of whom completed the sort.
Participants were 40% male and 60% female, and came from different
majors and class levels. 73% reported being "somewhat" private
people, with 11% saying they were not very private, and 15%
describing themselves as very private. With respect to experience
using computers, 5% said they were not very experienced, 45% said
they were somewhat experienced, and 48% said they were very
experienced (one participant did not answer the gender, privacy, or
computer experience levels).
Q-Sample
In an earlier study, a diverse group of 1189 participants in an
online experiment were asked, "If you have ever provided false or
phony information to a commercial Web site, why?" The question was
open-ended, and generated 535 responses.
These 535 responses were examined and similar answers were
eliminated. For example, many people answered that they had provided
phony information because they did not want to receive Spam; another
popular answer was "to prevent identity theft." Once duplicate
reasons were eliminated, 91 discrete reasons remained. These 91
reasons were used as a quasi-naturalistic Q-sample.
Procedure
This study is explorative, in that it tries using a method not
previously applied to the topic of online privacy to shed light on
how it is conceptualized. The statements about online privacy were
entered into an online software program known as "WebQ" that allowed
participants the opportunity to virtually sort them into 'piles'
based on how much each represented a particular dimension of
privacy. The software scrambled the order of the statements for each
participant.
Participants came to a computer lab in groups of 15-20, where a
research assistant demonstrated a short, fictitious Q-sort by sorting
9 personality characteristics according to how well they described a
person named Bill. Once participants had a basic understanding of how
the sorting task was accomplished using the software, they were given
a piece of paper and asked to read a short passage, representing one
of the five perspectives on privacy to which they were randomly assigned.
After reading their passages, they were instructed to open the WebQ
program on their computer and sort the statements found there
according to how much they did or did not represent the perspective
on privacy they had just read.
A pilot test had revealed that, including instructions, the task took
about 40 minutes, so subjects were told to expect to spend about an
hour on the task, longer if needed. The WebQ software enables
subjects to rearrange the statements as many times as they want to,
and participants were encouraged to use as much time and as many
iterations as needed until they felt satisfied with their sort.
Measures
Each subject was randomly assigned to one of the following five
dimensions of privacy:
"The spatial component—privacy as separation of private and public
physical spaces: Many social scientists believe that we divide our
living environment into two separate domains: a private space and a
public space. Entering a person's private space without consent is a
form of intrusion of privacy. For example, we all consider our homes,
bedrooms, bathrooms, or even our mailboxes to be private spaces where
we can be free from intrusion. We often feel threatened when these
private spaces are invaded.
Although the distinction of private and public spaces clearly exists
in the real world, some researchers believe that it can also be
extended to the virtual environment of the Internet. For example, in
the virtual world, a published Web site can be considered a public
place, but someone's personal computer or personal network would be
considered a private place. From this point of view, it can be argued
that providing some personal information to a Web site may increase
the likelihood of our virtual private space being invaded by
unauthorized people."
"The informational component—privacy as a matter of protecting
identity, personal information, and decision making: Researchers
believe that some information about us is central to the safety of
our identities and lives, whereas other information about us may not
be as central. For example, although we wouldn't mind sharing our
names with someone we just met at a bar, we usually would not feel
comfortable sharing our address out of fear that this person might
harm us. We sometimes give false information or simply refuse to give
certain information because we worry that our safety or identity will
be threatened."
"The rights or personal liberty component—people have a right to
privacy and should be able to protect it: Many people believe that we
have a given right to privacy. This means that even if our personal
property, safety, or identity is not at risk, we should still be able
to keep certain things from others. According to this point of view,
not disclosing certain personal information on the Internet is not
necessarily a matter of safety; rather, it is a matter of protecting
someone's right to privacy."
"The need component—psychologically people desire
privacy: Scientists believe that the desire to be private is an
innate psychological tendency. It is a personality trait. Just like
some of us are extroverts and some of us are introverts, some people
need to have a lot of privacy and others may not need as much.
According to this point of view, a person may decide not to disclose
certain personal information on the Internet because he/she feels
uncomfortable doing so. They may not have a specific reason why they
do not want to give this information. They simply feel uneasy about it."
"The boundary management component—the extent to which individuals
are able to control the spatial and informational aspects of their
private lives: Many people believe that disclosing (or not
disclosing) certain personal information is a way to define and
control relationships between people. For example, we can choose to
disclose certain information to someone, but not to other people,
because we feel closer to this individual. We may also choose not to
disclose certain information to someone because we feel that this
person is not important enough. From this perspective, an individual
may refuse to disclose certain personal information to a Web site
because they feel that this site may not be "close" enough to be
given this information. It is important to remember that this is NOT
a simple concern for safety. Just because we feel that someone is not
important enough to be given some information does not mean that we
feel threatened by them."
Participants were asked to sort each statement in the Q-sample
according to how much it corresponded to the perspective they read on
the paper. The scale used to sort the items was –5 to +5, with –5
meaning, "This statement does not correspond to the perspective on
privacy I read at all" and +5 meaning, "This statement is totally
relevant to the perspective on privacy I read." As is customary with
a Q sort, a forced distribution was used, and the computer would not
let subjects submit their results until an appropriate number of
statements received each score. Subjects had to put 6 statements in
the –5 and +5 categories, 7 statements in the –4 and +4 categories, 8
statements in the –3 and +3 categories, 9 in the –2 and +2
categories, 10 in the –1 and +1 categories, and 11 statements in the
0 category. Once this distribution was achieved, the results were
emailed to one of the study's authors for analysis.
After the sorting task, so as not to influence the sort in any way,
subjects reported their gender, how private they considered
themselves to be, and how experienced with computers they considered
themselves to be.
Results
This study predicted that if the five components extracted from past
literature were meaningful ways of organizing online privacy
concerns, then participants would organize statements about online
privacy in similar ways according to the privacy components. Thus, we
expected that under specific sorting instructions generated from the
five components of privacy, a majority of participants would sort the
91 online privacy statements in similar ways. Another way of
expressing this is to say that this hypothesis would be supported if
most of participants loaded into one by-person factor.
Spatial Component
Participants in group 1 (n = 15) received sorting instructions based
on the spatial component of privacy. These instructions required
participants to disregard their own opinions about online privacy and
to sort the 91 statements based on their relevancy to the spatial
component of privacy. A by-person principle component factor analysis
with varimax rotation for Q-sorts suggested a three-factor solution
explaining over 60% of the variance in the data. This result suggests
that there are three distinctive patterns of sorting these
statements. However, consistent to our prediction, 11 out of the 15
participants were loaded into factor 1. In other words, 11 out of 15
participants sorted 91 statements in the same pattern when asked to
think about these statements from a spatial perspective.
Informational Component
Participants in group 2 (n = 14) were instructed to sort the 91
statements according to their relevance to the informational aspect
of privacy. A by-person principle component factor analysis with
varimax rotation for Q-sorts suggested a four-factor solution
explaining over 58% of the variance in the data. This result suggests
that there are four distinctive patterns of sorting these statements.
8 out of 14 participants were included in factor 1, and the second,
third, and fourth factor each had 2 participants. Although a majority
of participants did sort the statements in the same pattern, almost
half of the participants in this group sorted the statements in
distinctive patterns. This suggests that the participants did not
have a consistent view of the 91 statements when asked to think about
these statements from an informational perspective.
The Rights or Personal Liberty Component
A third group of participants (n = 18) was instructed to sort the 91
statements according to the rights or personal liberty component. A
by-person principle component factor analysis with varimax rotation
for Q-sorts returned a 7-factor solution explaining 67 % of the
variance in the data. Further, only 12 out of 18 participants' factor
loading exceeded .60 on a single factor with factor loadings below
.40 on other factors. The first and the largest factor only included
6 participants. This result clearly suggests that participants did
not view the rights or personal liberty component in the same way.
Sorting of these 91 statements in this group was largely guided by
individual's subjective understandings instead of a consistent
operationalization.
The Psychological Component
The fourth component is the psychological component. Participants (n
= 17) in this condition were asked to sort the 91 statements based on
a view that privacy is a psychological need. A by-person principle
component factor analysis with varimax rotation for Q-sorts returned
a 5-factor solution explaining 66 % of the variance in the data.
Interestingly, 11 of the 17 participants were in the cluster with
loadings exceeding .60 on this factor and below .40 on other factors.
Further, three of the five factors had only 1 participant. This
pattern suggests that although a few participants each had
distinctive patterns of sorting the statements, a majority of
participants had similar ways of judging these statements based on
the psychological perspective of privacy.
The Boundary Management Component
Finally, the fifth group of participants (n = 16) was instructed to
sort the 91 statements based on the boundary management component. A
by-person principle component factor analysis with varimax rotation
for Q-sorts in this group returned a 4-factor solution explaining 56%
of the variance in the data. 7 participants had loadings above .60
for factor 1 and below .40 for other factors. 3 participants were
included in the second factor, and the third and fourth factor each
had 2 participants. The remaining 2 participants did not have factors
loadings above .60 for any factor. This result suggests that the
participants did not form a consistent view of the 91 statements when
asked to think about them from a boundary management perspective.
Discussion
A majority of people displayed a similar and consistent pattern
when asked to organize various reasons why people do not wish to give
personal information to a Web site based on spatial and psychological
views of privacy. However, our results suggest that people were not
able to use a consistent way of organizing these statements based on
the informational, rights, and boundary management perspective.
Especially for the rights component, several valid and distinctive
patterns of Q-sort were generated, suggesting that interpretation of
this privacy component was subjective and inconsistent.
It is interesting to note which dimensions were conceived of
consistently and which were not. Although cyberspace is not
physical, it appears that participants in this study are fairly
capable of using physical metaphors to think about what is private
and what is public. This may be reflective of the common use of
these metaphors in society; it may also be a function of the
metaphors being spelled out in the definition provided to the
participants. Participants also appear fairly unified in their
conceptualization of online privacy as a need, consistent with the
many studies showing high levels of concern over this issue.
On the other hand, the three dimensions with disparate sorts reflect
the lack of privacy-protecting behavior exhibited by many people. It
does not appear to be widely agreed upon what information is private,
what right to online privacy people have, or how to maintain the
distinction between the private and the public. While these results
do not explain the discrepancy between people's concern and their
behavior, the fact that they are consistent with its existence
suggests that there is potential for the use of this method to
examine the issue.
Indeed, this explorative study employs a unique method to examine
the five theoretical components of privacy extracted from past
literature by taking into account both objective and subjective
understandings of online privacy concerns. The between-group design
with different instructions objectively tests the degree to which a
particular privacy component is a meaningful way of organizing these
online privacy concerns. However, by changing the research focus from
traits, as in a conventional quantitative research paradigm, to a
people-oriented view as permitted by the Q-methodology, we allowed
people's subjectivity to be examined and interpreted in a meaningful way.
Traditional quantitative methods relying on objective observations
may overemphasize preconceived notions of privacy and miss the
subjective nature of this concept. While preconceived theoretical
components of privacy can be useful to understand individual concerns
about online privacy, variations in people's subjective views of this
issue should not be pushed aside under the label of an error term.
Instead, future research should focus on the underlying structure of
people's subjective perceptions of various issues related to online privacy.
Although it was not a goal of the present study, sorting patterns
displayed by different factors of participants can be analyzed and
compared to explore various sorting patterns in more detail. However,
such an analysis requires a relatively larger sample of participants
in each condition.
In addition, to sort through 91 statements on a forced quasi-normal
distribution can be a long and boring task. Variations in sorting
patterns may be caused by participants' fatigue and lack of
concentration. Replications with a reduced number of statements
should be conducted in the future. These replications should also
try asking participants to sort the statements without reading about
or being exposed to a particular dimension. Not only would this
allow more insight into people's existing conceptualizations, it
would minimize the likelihood that results are affected by how the
dimension is explained in the instructions, as may have happened with
the spatial dimension in this study. While the results here are
useful in seeing how people conceptualize online privacy, they are at
least as helpful at providing insight into how these
conceptualizations might be elucidated through future research.
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