Not Having Enough’ Can Safeguard Privacy: Resource Scarcity and Willingness to Share Personal Information

Consumers today face several requests to share personal information when they go online. Cookie-requests, registration webforms, location-sharing requests are examples of techniques used by online firms to collect consumer-level data. The reason this consumer-level data is important for firms is because this data helps them understand the consumers better and target efficiently. However, as much as companies attempt to capture consumer-level information, individuals also have concerns about sharing personal data, as misuse of individual-level data following data breaches often occurs online.
Therefore, the question is, what makes consumers share their personal information online? Past research has investigated several factors that contribute to varying levels of information-disclosure. Some of these factors are website-related (e.g., website appearance, Jarvenpaa, Tractinsky, and Saarinen 1999), and some are consumer-related (e.g., age and education, Smit, Van Noort, and Voorveld 2014).
The present investigation extends this literature by identifying a novel driver of consumers’ willingness to share personal information, namely the extent to which the consumers’ resources are scarce. These resources can be money, time, or a digital resource such as a phone battery. Consumers often feel they don’t have enough resources available to them. We hypothesize that this feeling of not having enough can lead to reduced willingness to share personal information.