Kirsten E. Martin

Information technology and privacy: conceptual muddles or privacy vacuums?

Within a given conversation or information exchange, do privacy expectations change based on the technology used? Firms regularly require users, customers, and employees to shift existing relationships onto new information technology, yet little is known as about how technology impacts established privacy expectations and norms. Coworkers are asked to use new information technology, users of gmail are asked to use GoogleBuzz, patients and doctors are asked to record health records online, etc. Understanding how privacy expectations change, if at all, and the mechanisms by which such a variance is produced will help organizations make such transitions. This paper examines whether and how privacy expectations change based on the technological platform of an information exchange. The results suggest that privacy expectations are significantly distinct when the information exchange is located on a novel technology as compared to a more established technology. Furthermore, this difference is best explained when modeled by a shift in privacy expectations rather than fully technology-specific privacy norms. These results suggest that privacy expectations online are connected to privacy offline with a different base privacy expectation. Surprisingly, out of the five locations tested, respondents consistently assign information on email the greatest privacy protection. In addition, while undergraduate students differ from non-undergraduates when assessing a social networking site, no difference is found when judging an exchange on email. In sum, the findings suggest that novel technology may introduce temporary conceptual muddles rather than permanent privacy vacuums. The results reported here challenge conventional views about how privacy expectations differ online versus offline. Traditionally, management scholarship examines privacy online or with a specific new technology platform in isolation and without reference to the same information exchange offline. However, in the present study, individuals appear to have a shift in their privacy expectations but retain similar factors and their relative importance—the privacy equation by which they form judgments—across technologies. These findings suggest that privacy scholarship should make use of existing privacy norms within contexts when analyzing and studying privacy in a new technological platform.

Putting mobile application privacy in context: An empirical study of user privacy expectations for mobile devices

ABSTRACT Users increasingly use mobile devices to engage in social activity and commerce, enabling new forms of data collection by firms and marketers. User privacy expectations for these new forms of data collection remain unclear. A particularly difficult challenge is meeting expectations for contextual integrity, as user privacy expectations vary depending upon data type collected and context of use. This article illustrates how fine-grained, contextual privacy expectations can be measured. It presents findings from a factorial vignette survey that measured the impact of diverse real-world contexts (e.g., medical, navigation, music), data types, and data uses on user privacy expectations. Results demonstrate that individuals’ general privacy preferences are of limited significance for predicting their privacy judgments in specific scenarios. Instead, the results present a nuanced portrait of the relative importance of particular contextual factors and information uses, and demonstrate how those contextual factors can be found and measured. The results also suggest that current common activities of mobile application companies, such as harvesting and reusing location data, images, and contact lists, do not meet users’ privacy expectations. Understanding how user privacy expectations vary according to context, data types, and data uses highlights areas requiring stricter privacy protections by governments and industry.

Entrepreneurs as Entrepreneur Make Value Judgments: An Exploration into the Moral Implications of Entrepreneurial Goods and Services

Philosopher Richard Rudner (1953) eloquently argued that scientists, in their role as scientists and performing the tasks core to being a scientist, make value judgments. Scientists make decisions in assigning value, importance, and priority to overall endeavors, particular projects, and specific hypotheses which have moral implications. In other words, if we identify a minimal core of the scientific method which transcends context, which Rudner does, we find value judgments made by scientists. Scientists are not value-neutral or amoral in their endeavors. Rather, as he aptly titled his article, scientists, qua scientists, make value judgments (Rudner, 1953). In this paper, I argue that the entrepreneur qua entrepreneur - as the creator of future markets for goods and services (Venkataraman, 1997) - makes value judgments. Entrepreneurship and ethics scholarship recognizes that the entrepreneur as an organization theorist, small business owner, business partner, financier, accountant, and strategic partner makes value judgments. Yet, the core of the entrepreneurial process - the tasks that transcend particular industries, locations, or forms - is the creation of markets for goods and services (Venkataraman, 1997), and the recognition, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities begets value-laden technologies that have been neglected in entrepreneurship scholarship. These technologies are designed and implemented by the entrepreneur and later impact stakeholders of technology. For example, a bottle is designed to be completely biodegradable, a social networking site is developed to leverage relationships for advertising, or airport surveillance is designed to monitor citizens. Capturing the implications of goods and services on society is difficult and complicated; hence, the entire field of Science and Technology Studies has developed for that purpose (Johnson, 2006). Rather than view goods and services as value-neutral (e.g., “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”), technology is designed to facilitate certain behavior and beliefs. These goods and services, or these technologies, are studied closely within engineering schools as the technologies entrepreneurs take to market impact a variety of stakeholders. Rather than place the onus to analyze and modify the implications of goods and services on the adopting market, the entrepreneur can be viewed as uniquely positioned to oversee technology during a critical, formative stage of technological development. Within the ongoing analysis of entrepreneurship, we have yet to include a careful ethical examination of entrepreneurial goods and services. I leverage theoretical constructs within Science and Technology Studies to examine the moral implications of entrepreneurial goods and services. Through this expanded view of technology, we see the goods and services differently - less abstract and with more morally important features, biases, and values. Identifying the post-exploitation effects of goods and services on society has implications to the process of entrepreneurial activity. In turn, I revisit the role of entrepreneurs during the entrepreneurial process and suggest the implications to entrepreneurship and ethics scholarship when applying this new view of goods and services.As noted by Rudner, “To refuse to pay attention to the value decisions which must be made, to make them intuitively, unconsciously, haphazardly, is to leave an essential aspect of scientific method scientifically out of control.” (1953: 6). Similarly, by not explicitly acknowledging the values and biases of entrepreneurial goods and services, we are left with few tools to understand the moral implications of entrepreneurial decision making during the entrepreneurial process. This paper seeks to explicitly identify such value decisions of entrepreneurs by exploring whether, when, and how entrepreneurs qua entrepreneurs make value judgments in converting technical information into goods and services.