Frieder Rodewald, Florian Keusch, Daria Szafran, Ruben L. Bach
Measuring Privacy Behavior with Donated Data

Data Donation Symposium 2024, Amsterdam, May 30th to May 31st, 2024

Privacy is a ubiquitous issue in our increasingly digitalized society. This study investigates the impact of users' privacy decisions on what data social network platforms collect about them. We build on a data donation approach to observe people's privacy behavior on Instagram directly. Our findings contextualize and advance previous studies that almost exclusively relied on users' self-reported behavior. Data is collected from a German probability-based online panel in two stages: Participants first complete a survey about their privacy behavior and well-studied predictors of that behavior, such as privacy concerns and privacy literacy. One week after the survey, participants are asked to download and donate their Instagram usage data. A one-week gap between the survey and donation request minimizes the mere-measurement effect, ensuring participants are less likely to hesitate in donating personal data due to prior privacy-related questions. The paper investigates 1) how participants' privacy behavior observed in the donated data compares to their self-reported privacy behavior and 2) how using observed privacy behavior enhances current models studying the relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behavior. Ultimately, our research shows that data donation is a valuable data collection method to understand online privacy and how that is a vital next step to explaining people's online privacy behavior.