Is This Information Too Personal? The Relationship between Privacy Concerns and Personality

Privacy is an important aspect of interactive system design. To clarify whether there are individual differences in privacy concerns that relate to personality, we conduct a questionnaire study with 287 participants in which we assessed privacy concerns and the “big five” personality factors openness to experience, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and extraversion. Our results show that overall these five factors have low associations to privacy concerns in general and only openness to experience and neuroticism contribute significantly to privacy concerns. This is in contrast to previous studies, which show varying results. We conclude that the relationship between privacy concerns and personality factors should be re-examined with more reliable and valid instruments in the future. With this paper, we contribute with knowledge about the role of personality traits in influencing privacy concerns.