Sceptics and supporters of corporate use of behavioural data : Attitudes towards informational privacy and Internet surveillance in Sweden

With the growing use of the Internet, companies are increasingly collecting and using personal data for commodifying purposes, resulting in both benefits and privacy risks for users and raising the issue of corporate surveillance. The present article investigates people’s attitudes towards corporate collection of personal data, discusses possible reasons for attitude results in relation to self-regulation, trust and media context, and compares these findings with results from the previous year. The study is based on a survey using a large-n probability sample of the Swedish population. The results are in accordance with the suggested privacy paradox: the majority of the population, as in the previous year, have negative attitudes towards corporate collection of their data, largely independent of context. Nonetheless, they continue to share their data without making any great effort to secure their privacy. Whether this depends on inexperience, ignorance or resignation, everyday corporate surveillance does not meet expectations regarding the just governing of informational privacy. As the results showed that the more positive people were towards sharing their data in various contexts, the more positively this affected their attitudes towards the fact that the data were being used by the collecting companies for various purposes, balancing out the power differences online would benefit not only users but also companies to a great extent