Theoretical and practical considerations for online privacy research : CONSENT as a case-study

Abstract

CONSENT, a three-year project co-financed by the European Union (EU), investigated whether recent changes to consumer and commercial practices have resulted in users of the Internet giving up their fundamental right to privacy. As part of this project a large-scale online survey was carried out to determine the attitudes and associated behaviours relating to privacy of users of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Google+, and user-generated content websites (UGCs) such as YouTube and Wikipedia. The CONSENT online questionnaire was developed within a coherent theoretical framework and included psychometrically sound measures drawn from the literature. The measures focused on beliefs about technology and about privacy together with personal characteristics and privacy related behaviour. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed that the measures used have good psychometric properties. This chapter also describes the approaches adopted by an interdisciplinary research team in implementing the CONSENT survey in 21 languages across the EU.