Our respondents were generally comfortable providing preference information to Web sites. However, they were often very uncomfortable providing credit card numbers and social security numbers. We also observed significant differences in sensitivity to seemingly similar kinds of data. For example, while postal mail address, phone number, and email address can all be used to contact someone, most of our respondents said they would never or rarely feel comfortable providing their phone number but would usually or always feel comfortable providing their email address. The comfort level for postal mail address fell somewhere in between.
Many factors are important in decisions about information disclosure.
When deciding whether to provide information to Web sites, our respondents report that the most important factor is whether or not information will be shared with other companies and organizations. Other highly important factors include whether information is used in an identifiable way, the kind of information collected, and the purpose for which the information is collected. Whether a site posts a privacy policy, whether a site has a privacy seal of approval, and whether a site discloses a data retention policy were viewed as important, but considerably less so than the other factors we asked about. Acceptance of the use of persistent identifiers varies according to their purpose. Internet users dislike automatic data transfer.