Would a Privacy Fundamentalist Sell Their DNA for $1000...If Nothing Bad Happened as a
Result? The Westin Categories, Behavioral Intentions, and Consequences
Venue
Proceedings of the Symposium On Usable Privacy and
Security: SOUPS '14, USENIX (2014)
Westin's Privacy Segmentation Index has been widely used to measure privacy
attitudes and categorize individuals into three privacy groups: fundamentalists,
pragmatists, and unconcerned. Previous research has failed to establish a robust
correlation between the Westin categories and actual or intended behaviors.
Unexplored however is the connection between the Westin categories and individuals'
responses to the consequences of privacy behaviors. We use a survey of 884 Amazon
Mechanical Turk participants to investigate the relationship between the Westin
Privacy Segmentation Index and attitudes and behavioral intentions for both
privacy-sensitive scenarios and privacy-sensitive consequences. Our results
indicate a lack of correlation between the Westin categories and consequences. We
discuss potential implications of this attitude-consequence gap.