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Emotions That Drive Action - Privacy Concerns

Delivered September 3, 2019. Contributor: Gail

Goals

To understand the "target emotions"for a campaign for an app that solves people's (consumers) privacy concerns because of hypothesis that emotions will drive people to action. To have 2-5 answers headlined by the emotion (fear/humor/inspiration/disdain/anger or other emotion), and supported by research, ideally surveys, or other reporting that answers the question: "What emotion associated with privacy and its solutions would best drive people to take action to control their privacy, including a holistic privacy app like Figleaf?" If possible, to have any research citations on the primary demographic which is an American 30-49 year old, skewing male, middle-upper income (100+ household income), likely have children/family. More general population research is acceptable if cited/explained as such.

Early Findings

  • Amid public concerns over Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data, there is a renewed focus on how social media companies collect personal information and make it available to marketers.
  • While there is evidence that social media works in some important ways for people, studies have shown that people are anxious about all the personal information that is collected and shared and the security of their data.
  • Another survey found that about half of social media users were not at all or not too confident their data were in safe hands.
  • Just 9% of people believe they have “a lot of control” over the information that is collected about them, even as the vast majority (74%) say it is very important to them to be in control of who can get information about them.
  • Six out of ten Americans (61%) have said they would like to do more to protect their privacy. Additionally, two-thirds have said current laws are not good enough in protecting people’s privacy, and 64% support more regulation of advertisers.
  • People pursue strategies to try to avoid problems on social media and the internet overall. Fully 86% of internet users said in 2012 they had taken steps to try to be anonymous online. “Hiding from advertisers” was relatively high on the list of those they wanted to avoid.
  • Boomers are also the least confident (89 percent) generation in terms of sharing personal data online. This correlates to a nationwide study commissioned by Hide My Ass! (HMA), a popular VPN service provider, about Baby Boomers and their different approach to online privacy. According to their research, Boomers are likely to respond “I only allow trusted people to see anything I post & employ a lot of privacy restrictions.”
  • The Malwarebytes Labs team conducted a survey from January 14 to February 15, 2019 to inquire about the data privacy concerns of nearly 4,000 Internet users in 66 countries.
  •  Fear is an emotion that drives privacy concerns.
  •  This study "explores the dynamics of personalized services in online shopping, with regard to emotions, privacy and trust. The basic emotions of happiness and anxiety were chosen. A sample of 182 online shoppers was used to assess the effect of privacy and trust on their emotions through personalized services, and how these emotions ultimately affect their purchase intentions. The findings indicate that privacy affects anxiety while trust affects happiness."
  • Internet users worry about online privacy but feel powerless to do much about it.
  • In addition to this public search, we scanned our proprietary research database of over 1 million sources and were unable to find any specific research reports that address the exact stated goals.

Proposed next steps:

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Our initial research did not find any credible and reliable source that pointed to exact emotions that would drive people to action to control their privacy. Instead what we found were some credible studies that pointed out that people are truly concerned with privacy and by extrapolating from the credible sources, we found that fear, distrust, worry, and anxiety were all emotions that were drivers to privacy concerns. While many demographics were cited, nothing that pinpointed an American 30-49 year old, skewing male, middle-upper income (100+ household income), likely have children/family were found. The credible demographic information we found were all age (Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers) and gender based only, with no income data available. Moving forward, we suggest research that further examines these fear based emotions based on age and gender demographics. For example, are GenX more anxious than Millennials about their privacy and if so why or why not? We would examine the differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. This will be a US focus. Please note that GenX and Millennials most closely match the age demographic provided to us of 30-49, so if we should only focus on them, then that should be clearly communicated to us in any reply.