Contextual Determinants for Users’ Acceptance of Personal Data Processing: A Multinational Analysis

The importance of “context” in people’s privacy decisions is widely recognized, mostly in the area of inter-personal privacy. A comprehensive multinational analysis of what users consider to be the main contextual factors impacting their privacy decisions is still largely missing though, rendering it difficult to integrate context into data processing systems and privacy policy frameworks. We present a qualitative study in 4 countries followed by a largescale (N=9,625) quantitative study in 8 countries aimed at identifying the contextual, attitudinal and demographic determinants that influence individuals' acceptance of scenarios involving the use of their personal data, and at gauging the relative influence of these determinants globally and country-wise. We develop parsimonious regression models to analyze the relative importance of different factors in different countries. The implications of such models in developing context and privacy aware systems and privacy policy frameworks are discussed.