Sacrificing cost, performance and usability for privacy: understanding the value of privacy in a multi‐criteria decision problem

Increasing interest in technology to enhance online information privacy makes research on understanding how people value their privacy a priority. The current research aims to quantify the value of privacy protection in the context of smartphone technology by estimating the trade‐offs that people are willing to make for privacy protection. We also investigated how the value of privacy protection varied by contextual variables and individual characteristics. To do so, we adapted a paradigm proposed by Tversky, Sattah, and Slovic (1988) to examine the value of privacy protection by estimating trade‐offs for an encrypted smartphone. The results show that respondents were willing to pay non‐trivial premiums for smartphone privacy protection. Interestingly, ambiguously describing a privacy threat increased the value of privacy protection compared to depicting the threat with more contextual detail. We also observed the effects of general privacy concern, age, and self‐reported political attitude on the value of privacy protection. These results demonstrate the importance of accounting for user values in the design of a usable security system.