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Impelled by the development of technologies that facilitate collection, distribution, storage, and manipulation of personal consumer information, privacy has become a "hot" topic for policy makers. Commercial interests seek to maximize and then leverage the value of consumer information, while, at the same time, consumers voice concerns that their rights and ability to control their personal information in the marketplace are being violated. However, despite the complaints, it appears that consumers freely provide personal data. This research explores what we call the "privacy paradox" or the relationship between individuals' intentions to disclose personal information and their actual personal information disclosure behaviors.
With increasingly sophisticated technology, the effectiveness of collecting, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of consumer information has certainly increased, especially as related costs have fallen. Marketers who live by the adage "know thy customer" may view this progress as movement toward the desired state where knowledge of customers leads to ultraefficient communication to exactly the right target audiences about product/service offerings, which perfectly match the needs and desires of those same groups (Moon 2000).
However, as marketers leverage the ability to collect and analyze evergreater amounts of consumer information, serious concerns have arisen over the potential erosion of personal privacy (cf. Cavoukian and Hamilton 2002; Whiting 2002; Williams 2002). The popular press has featured privacy concerns as a major negative result of the "information age," and political forces have sought to transform consumers' felt deprivation into public policy initiatives. Consumers are constantly faced with the not-so-obvious trade-off between the desire for better products and services that are touted to be the result of more detailed customer profiles on the one hand and the privacy encroachment that such disclosure causes on the other.
Yet, for all the concern that people express about their personal information, which could be expected to drive one's intended and actual disclosure, our observations of actual marketplace behavior anecdotally suggest that people are less than selective and often cavalier in the protection of their own data profiles. Few studies have examined this discrepancy between individuals' intentions to protect their own privacy and how they behave in the marketplace. The purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate whether people say one thing (intend to limit disclosure) and then do another...