Surveillance? : The influence of information asymmetry on consumers’ perceptions of online personalization

Abstract: Data collection and online personalization has become essential part of modern marketing, and thus, embedded into consumer’s everyday life. This has emerged a lot of negative attention in the media and privacy concerns among consumers – however, their attitudes towards privacy seems to be controversial with lack of privacy enhancing behavior. The purpose of this study was to find out what is consumers take on online personalization, data collection and GDPR. In order to the tackle the causing reasons of such perceptions, focus group discussions were performed. The emerging thoughts were analyzed with the concepts of privacy paradox and information asymmetry – how structural imbalance between the advertisement network, companies and consumers impacted to their thinking about personalization and which factors caused the unwillingness to enhance one’s privacy, despite the attitudes that would predict different behavior. The results showed, that many respondents do not mind personalization if they perceive it relevant. However, the intrusive nature of its practices made the participants, directly or indirectly, reluctant towards it, as it was highlighted that it is not personalization per se that made the respondents uncomfortable, but how it was done. Due to the advertisement networks’ opaque nature, the participants founded challenging to comprehend how personalization was performed. Thus, conspiracy theories about surveillance, such as tapping via smartphone, were broad up to explain companies’ ability to know and target them so well. The main channel for companies to inform consumers about their privacy policy is terms and conditions. However, due to several reasons, the decision making for one’s privacy face many hinders, that may influence in how consumers perceive their privacy and how their personal data is collected and used. A controversiality between GDPR’s, companies’ and consumers’ view on privacy self-management is evident, as the regulation and companies rely too much on consumer’s own responsibility.