Adam Joinson on privacy and public trust in government

There can scarcely have been a more public demonstration of the importance of privacy and trust in e-government than Alistair Darling’s revelation to the House of Commons last November that two discs containing the personal information of 25 million people had been lost in transit by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Privacy, and people’s attitudes towards the collection, use and dissemination of their personal information, has been a topic of academic and legal research for several decades. During this time, relatively little progress has been made towards the establishment of a single, unifying definition of privacy, leading the American researcher Daniel Solove to conclude that it is a ‘concept in disarray’.

There are a number of reasons for this. One is that when people talk about privacy, they can refer to any number of concepts, including people’s attitudes towards the collection of information (for example, people being ‘concerned about their privacy’), to a specific situation (‘seeking out privacy’), or to a ‘right to privacy’.

Trust in recipient

The Economic and Social Research Council-funded ‘Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online’ (PRISD) project (1) has investigated the links between privacy, trust and people’s behaviour when faced with a privacy threat.

In a series of studies in which people were faced with a request for personal information, researchers identified two key privacy pathways that determined behaviour. The first was people’s pre-existing attitudes towards privacy in general, and the protection of personal information. The second pathway was based on each individual’s interpretation of the actual privacy-threatening situation, in this case the person’s perception of their anonymity and confidentiality. Importantly, the impact of this situational interpretation of privacy was largely determined by people’s trust in the recipients of the personal information: their perception of the recipients’ professionalism, the security to protect the information disclosed, and the integrity and benevolent intentions of the data requestors. These same variables are critical when considering trust in large government.

To probe the role of trust further, a study was designed in which both privacy and trust were experimentally manipulated via mock websites. The results showed that high levels of trust countered the impact of low privacy protection on people’s willingness to disclose sensitive information. Only when low privacy protection was combined with low trust did people begin to withhold personal information from the researchers.

Trust and competence

When we talk about trust, we often think of issues of integrity and honesty. However, another key component of trust is competence. For instance, competence is critical when we trust an e-commerce organisation – to secure our data, process our order correctly and deliver the goods. The results of studies by the PRISD project on identity cards and privacy also suggest that trust, and competence, play a key role in determining people’s attitudes towards personal data, privacy and the government.

In the first study, we found that people’s attitudes to privacy influenced how they reacted to different possible implementations of identity cards.(2) Even people with low concern about levels of privacy began to oppose identity cards if they were developed in a privacy-threatening way.
In a follow-up study, we examined the impact of trust in the government (both competence and integrity) and attitudes towards ID cards.

A sample of 181 politically-involved people, and 223 Open University students, were interrogated using an online survey (the report is available on the PRISD website). Alongside a series of questions about ID cards and different ways of implementing the system, participants responded to three statements designed to measure their trust: ‘The United Kingdom government can be trusted’; ‘The United Kingdom government is competent enough to create a secure identity card system’; and ‘The United Kingdom government is motivated by the desire to protect its citizens’ best interests’.

Threat and trust

Once participants’ prior attitudes towards ID cards were controlled for, the analyses showed that the perceived privacy threat of ID cards, and level of trust in the government, were significant predictors of people’s attitudes towards different implementations of ID cards. Further analysis found an interaction between privacy threat and trust, such that the combination of high concern about privacy with low trust in the government led to more opposition than simply summing the two variables would have predicted.

The results of the work of the PRISD project suggest that organisations, including government, must consider not only the protection of privacy when collecting data from customers and citizens, but also the ways in which trust in the recipients of that information influences people’s attitudes towards their privacy.

References

(1) See http://www.prisd.net/

(2) A N Joinson, C B Paine, T Buchanan and U-R Reips (2006). Watching me, watching you: Privacy attitudes and reactions to identity card implementation scenarios in the United Kingdom. Journal of Information Science, 32 (4), 334-343.

Dr. Adam Joinson is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems, School of Management, University of Bath. He led the ‘Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online’ project