Online Disclosure and Privacy Measures: How we protect our personal information online

Abstract

Online disclosure is a key element of many online platforms, as well as an important factor for numerous scientific studies. However, privacy concerns often limit the willingness of users and respondents to share their personal information. For this reason, privacy measures have been implemented on many online platforms. The relationship between online disclosure and these privacy measures still needed to be confirmed. Our study used an online survey assisted by a data collection tool to measure the respondents’ privacy concern, online disclosure, knowledge about and use of privacy measures. Of these 4 factors, we found that people who were more concerned about their online privacy were less likely to disclose personal information, and more likely to have strict privacy settings. Moreover, we found that people with strict privacy settings were likely to share less information.