These days many websites require you to log in, otherwise you can’t get access to the website. Before you can log in, you have to register yourself. When registering you give information about yourself to the website.
Some users will be concerned about giving their personal information to a website. They don’t know what that website will do with their information. Still a lot of people will register. According to the article ‘ What Drives Users’ Website Registration? The Network Externalities versus Information Privacy Dilemma.’ from Li, T., and Pavlou, P (2016) this is due to word of mouth and displaying popularity. They call this positive network externalities and they would outweigh the negative effect of privacy concerns.
However, there is another option for registration. More and more websites allow their users to register through Facebook, Twitter or other external websites. This has multiple advantages. First of all, the convenience. You only have to click on ‘register using Facebook’. As long as you have a Facebook account, this step will be much faster than an original registration form. Second, people are used to Facebook and they already set their privacy preferences . Third, for the developers of the website this will be much easier to implement. As well as the information saved to the website will be less, making the website cheaper for the owners of the website.
In my opinion, if I want to access a website that requires me to register I will register either way. Nowadays, I have so many accounts that all my personal information is already out there. Another website knowing I’m a female won’t really matter. Furthermore, if a website is so popular that I want access to it, I wouldn’t care about my personal information, otherwise I wouldn’t get access to it. You can compare this with cookies. If you don’t accept them, you can’t go on the website. And how many of you read the terms of conditions of these cookies?
Bibliography
Li, T., and Pavlou, P. (2016) What Drives Users’ Website Registration? The Network Externalities versus Information Privacy Dilemma
Hey Alma, this is a very interesting blog post.
You have actually precisely described an interesting effect of privacy: the endownment effect. This implication of this effect on privacy on the internet is that consumers care more about losing than gaining anonymity. This means that users won’t put effort in recovering the privacy of personal details they gave away and thus are more prone to give away their personal details once more.
This article (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/ebusiness-sure-you-can-trust-us/) even shows that 90% of e-commerce customers don’t trust companies to keep their data secure, but they still keep using those sites.
Your last alinea is a great example of the endownment effect haha!
Hi Alma, thank you for the post.
Personally, I don’t think that people’s registration on websites is so much because of word of mouth and displaying popularity, but is more an illustration of the privacy paradox. In essence, this refers to the fact that although the majority of people will claim that they are deeply concerned with their online privacy, their actions tell a different story. In my opinion, this is largely caused by a lack of awareness of the risks associated with personal information misuse and of how to better protect one’s privacy. An interesting article about the topic can be found here: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1394/1312.
Hi Alma, interesting post!
I think a lot of people including myself, don’t really mind that our personal information is everywhere. Just a you said, I wouldn’t care because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to acces some websites anymore. However, personally speaking, giving my personal information doesn’t prevent my from registering on a website. The thing that prevents me is filling out the form, which is very time consuming. If all websites would offer the possibility to register through facebook, it will save a lot of time. However, not everyone owns a facebook account, so other options should still be open.