Is privacy really a paradox? Laying the groundwork to study the gap between privacy valuation and behavior

Privacy is an important concept that has been investigated extensively in context of user expectations and their actual behavior. In this investigation, we attempt to understand how people value privacy differently. We argue that people lump privacy into a single monolithic construct when they discuss privacy, but privacy behavior is based on distinct situational factors. We posit that users view privacy differently in varying contexts and make their decisions based on their priorities. The overall goals of our research are to: 1) identify the salient situational contexts in which users make privacy decisions; 2) test if there are individual differences in the context users think are important; and 3) test if populations can be clustered based on the types of contexts users think are salient. Our results reveal that there are significant variations among people in privacy perception and that populations can be clustered based on differences in privacy perception.