The effect of effort, control and value frames on online users privacy decision

A frame refers to a decision maker’s perception of a decision problem. Frames affect outcomes of decisions and are partially controlled by how decision problems are formulated. This study investigated the effect of framing alternatives in a privacy decision as gaining or losing value, need to make an effort and gaining control in an online environment. Also a structure among the many effects found in earlier research concerning privacy in the context of Internet based services was sought. For these purposes two experiments and one survey were conducted at a university in Sweden. The study included 238 individuals, 197 of them being in the age range of 19-30. The participants were approached in public areas at the University and were asked to register on a fictive online cloud service. During registration they got a choice of registering automatically with little control and manually with control over what information would be published. The most salient effect found was the impact of framing the low control alternative as time saving, meaning that the participants were willing to give up privacy to save time. The practical implication of these results would be for developers of new online services to focus on making it easy and time efficient to take control over private information. For value and control frames no significant effects were found. Also exploring the result of the survey, a structure with the two components online concern and willingness to take risk online were found