Privacy Choice During Crisis

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Ghose, Anindya; Li, Beibei; Macha, Meghanath; Sun, Chenshuo; Foutz, Natasha Zhang
• 署名单位: New York University; Carnegie Mellon University; Adobe Systems Inc.; Renmin University of China; City University of Hong Kong; University of Virginia
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.00017
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: consumer privacy; Covid-19; CRISIS; Location data; mobility

摘要

Consumers' privacy choice between withholding and sharing personal data may change during crises. Crises not only alter personal considerations of benefits and costs of this choice, but also trigger societal considerations, such as use of shared data in crisis management. Although the literature on privacy choice has focused on personal considerations, research on how this choice is influenced by broader circumstances remains sparse. We address this topic by leveraging newly available location big data and a global public health crisis as a natural shock. Analyzing 22 billion raw records of intertemporal individual-level mobile location data across a wide spectrum of cities in the United States, we present the first large-scale evidence that opt-out reduces during a crisis, and societal, beyond personal, considerations might have influenced consumers' privacy choices.