Privacy Is Important, but When Is It Thought About?

Consumers desire privacy, but their actions often seem to conflict (privacy paradox). Prior research focused on situations where privacy-decisions are focal (e.g., choosing passwords), recommending smoothing frictions or heightening attitude salience via contextual cues to address these inconsistencies. However, in many situations (e.g., shopping), even when consumers face privacy-relevant decisions (e.g., exchanging one’s email for discounts), privacy decisions are not part of the focal task. For these situations, we propose that thoughts about privacy are crowded out by task-related thoughts, even when encountering contextual cues that should trigger privacy thoughts. Across four studies, our findings suggest that thoughts about privacy, assessed by open-ended and indirect measures, are scarce and dwarfed by thoughts about the focal task. Furthermore, contextual cues (e.g., marketer requests for information, browsing situation) alone were generally insufficient to generate spontaneous thoughts about privacy. However, in combination with close-ended measures, contextual cues generated moderate levels of privacy-related thoughts.