Group discussion improves discrimination between privacy contexts

Digital practices have introduced new questions regarding what kind of data collection is acceptable, and in which context. In principle, following the framework of contextual integrity, people’s judgements should be sensitive to what data is shared with whom for what purpose. In reality, however, people often approve of data sharing indiscriminately, defaulting to broad acceptance across contexts, a phenomenon documented as privacy apathy or digital resignation. Here, we focus on people’s judgement about acceptable data practices, which we also expect to show a lack of discrimination. Drawing on two possible causes for this lack of discrimination, i.e. either a lack of attention and cognitive effort, or a lack of awareness of social norms, we tested two interventions to improve the discrimination between privacy contexts. In two preregistered in-person social experiments (N = 118), we first asked individuals to judge the acceptability of data sharing across a set of contexts. We then compared this individual baseline to the second judgements they provided, either after discussing with peers, or just thinking alone a second time. First individual judgements confirmed a form of privacy indifference, and weakly discriminated between the contexts in which data sharing took place. After group deliberation made people’s judgements more discriminate than individual reflection. Practically, these results suggest that reducing privacy indifference and improving nuance in privacy judgments can benefit from building environments that support a shared understanding and normative development around appropriate data use.