Data about individuals can be used for a range of public benefit purposes, such as public health and infrastructure planning. Measuring public attitudes specifically towards such data use contexts is key for ethical evaluations from a privacy perspective. Moreover, given the internationalization of data markets and policies, it is becoming increasingly important to learn how attitudes and preferences regarding such policies vary context-specifically across countries. To be able to measure such variations, I combine Nissenbaum’s concept of Contextual Integrity with Masur et al.'s (2024) Comparative Privacy Research Framework to incorporate meso-level comparisons between social contexts into macro-level comparisons between countries. I empirically applied this approach by conducting an international, longitudinal online survey experiment. For the meso-level, the survey experiment presented respondents with fictitious data use scenarios which varied in contexts and properties of the data use according to several Contextual Integrity parameters (data type, recipient, transmission principles). For the macro-level, the survey was run in three countries (Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom) that vary in their degree of individualism, which could be relevant for attitudes towards using individual data for public benefit. The findings reveal differences in effects of parameters across countries, particularly with respect to data recipients (such as a more negative effect of public agencies in Germany than in other countries). Across countries, the overall strongest effects are found for data type, showing a relatively higher acceptance for health data use. Beyond such concrete findings, this study demonstrates how exactly social contexts can be accounted for in macro-level comparative research on privacy attitudes. As the identified parameter-specific differences suggest, cross-country comparative research on privacy should consider context-specific comparisons additional to measurements of general privacy attitudes to reveal otherwise non-measured variations across countries.
