Counteracting the Negative Effect of Form Auto-completion on the Privacy Calculus

When filling out web forms, people typically do not want to submit every piece of requested information to every website. Instead, they selectively disclose information after weighing the potential benefits and risks of disclosure: a process called “privacy calculus”. Giving users control over what to enter is a prerequisite for this selective disclosure behavior. Exercising this control by manually filling out a form is a burden though. Modern browsers therefore offer an auto-completion feature that automatically fills out forms with previously stored values. This feature is convenient, but it makes it so easy to submit a fully completed form that users seem to skip the privacy calculus altogether. In an experiment we compare this traditional auto-completion tool with two alternative tools that give users more control than the traditional tool. While users of the traditional tool indeed forego their selective disclosure behavior, the alternative tools effectively reinstate the privacy calculus.