Privacy Concerns and Information Disclosure: An Illusion of Control Hypothesis

In this paper, we run a series of experiments in order to investigate one possible cause of inconsistency in people’s behavior and concerns regarding online privacy. Even though individuals claim that privacy is very important, many end up revealing considerable private information in online social networks. It is possible that individuals suffer from illusion of control when dealing with the privacy of their data: when subjects are personally responsible for the publication of private information online, they may also tend to perceive some form of control over the access and use of that information by others. If, instead, a third party were responsible for the publication of the same data, they may feel a loss of control and realize that once private information is posted online not only can it be accessed, but also used by others without authorization: once it is available on the network, that information becomes indeed public.