Privacy attitudes - behaviour and political culture: a comparative study of millennials in Mexico and Spain
Creators: name: Morlet Corti, Yazmin
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2022

description: Throughout the era of surveillance capitalism, we see that current economic models attribute high importance to massive data collection from individuals which aim to promote heightened levels of consumption (Bauman &amp; Lyon, 2012; Lyon, 2014; Spiekermann et al., 2015; Struijs et al., 2014; Zuboff, 2019). In this context, privacy plays a vital role. For the reason mentioned above, this research contributes to understanding privacy attitudes-behaviours and how political culture traits influence these. Privacy literature argues that attitudes-behaviours are interconnected because where attitudes exist, behaviours should follow. This doctoral study allows an exploration of how citizens in different countries do express their privacy attitudes separately. However, these are influenced differently by other traits provided by political culture literature. Unfortunately, privacy studies have several distinct limitations. Firstly, they mainly focus on measuring privacy as to how much people express concerns about their online privacy in surveys (Acquisti, 2004; Brandimarte et al., 2013; Carignani &amp; Gemmo, 2018; Norberg et al., 2007). Measuring only privacy concerns is problematic because people will always express concerns when they are asked due to social desirability. Furthermore, this is especially problematic when results show that people do not necessarily guard their privacy online (Bandara et al., 2017; Brandimarte et al., 2013). Moreover, secondly, privacy scholarship lacks consideration of real-life situations to reflect upon privacy behaviours (Solove, 2021). Finally, the current scholarship on privacy has often been too focused on the Global North (di Bella, 2019); studies on privacy attitudes-behaviours have been exceedingly US-based. The same issue is found in political culture research which has also been too focused on the United States and European countries. Thus, this research presents a comparative case study to understand Mexican and Spanish millennials. A mixed-method approach is utilised to answer the research question. The data employed in this research is retrieved from interviews conducted with privacy experts in Spain and Mexico and quantitative data extracted from millennials using the multimethod tool. Young people are studied in this research because of their high levels of online engagement and their unique behaviours and views. The multimethod tool integrates measurement of the context of privacy behaviours (Nissenbaum, 2004) whilst considering that the concept of privacy is multi-dimensional (Raab &amp; Goold, 2011). The main finding is that despite different privacy concerns expressed in the two cases, there are concerns, and what explains and influences concerns slightly varies across Mexican and Spanish millennials. This research also demonstrates that there are temporal shifts in attitudes and knowledge on data protection rights once individuals are presented with privacy expectations. This work presents three contributions. First, it provides a way to complement privacy studies and how these are undergone, mainly because privacy scholarship fails to address specific situations and primarily measures individual privacy concerns (Acquisti, 2004; Brandimarte et al., 2013; Carignani &amp; Gemmo, 2018; Norberg et al., 2007). Second, this research includes a new measure of privacy concerns and how contextual integrity is conceived and measured. It also introduces political culture factors in the study of privacy attitudes, which allow a further understanding of trust-distrust, individualism-collectivism, and the degree to which people know and understand their choices (6, 1998a; Joinson et al., 2010; Solove, 2021). Finally, by understanding how much privacy is culturally dependent (Acquisti et al., 2020; Altman, 1977; Milberg et al., 1995), we can advance in understanding people’s privacy attitudes-behaviours more advantageously in other contexts besides the United States and Europe.