Towards a Taxonomy of Perceived Consequences of Privacy-invasive Practices

Internet users are increasingly concerned about their information privacy based on how individuals and organisations access and handle personal information. So far, literature has mostly dealt with information privacy concerns, referring to how individuals perceive organisational privacy practices, or with privacy risks in general. Yet, a deeper understanding is missing regarding the consequences individuals perceive to arise from privacy-invasive practices, i.e. the negative outcomes that people are afraid of due to an infringement of their privacy. To fill this gap in research, we systematically investigate how perceived privacy-invasive data collection and usage can affect individuals. Based on our focus group data, we develop a taxonomy of perceived consequences of privacy-invasive practices. It consists of six identified categories of consequences, namely social, psychological, resource-related, independence-related, legal, and physical consequences, and several privacy-specific subtypes within these categories