Privacy & Personalization: Preliminary Results of an Empirical Study of Disclosure Behavior

This paper describes empirical research into the privacy preferences and behaviors of individuals regarding personalization in music recommender systems. These phenomena concern music recommendations based on two different types of user information: preferences for music genres and personality traits. Our results indicate similar disclosure behavior by users for both types of personal information. This contradicts attitudes of users as reported in postexperiment questionnaires and interviews. Factors found to influence disclosure behavior are: information about the purpose of the disclosure and recipients of the information, the degree of confidentiality of the information involved, and the benefits people expect to gain from disclosing personal information.