Luring the Prey: Attracting Online Consumer Participation through Choice Configurations

With the escalating significance of personal privacy, one of the most controversial subjects deals with the use of consumer information -should consumers be asked to object to the use of personal data (“opt-out”), or should they be asked to consent to the use of such data (“opt-in”)? Various industry and consumer associations have held contradictory opinions on this question. Fundamentally, the opt-in and opt-out schemes can be operationalized via two aspects: (1) descriptions of the option through positive or negative phrasing, and (2) default status of the preference. This paper integrates various theoretical perspectives that help explicate the difference in consumer participations between opt-in and opt-out configurations. Specifically, an experiment was conducted to observe the responses of some subjects under various opt-in and opt-out configurations. Our results show that the use of opt-in and opt-out lead to different levels of participation. Further, among the opt-in configurations, different option descriptions and use of defaults triggered different responses. These findings provide useful insights to regulatory bodies in formulating policies related to seeking consumer consent, and help Internet Web sites design proper data collection practices.