Self Disclosure and the Monetary Value of Clear Privacy Policies

This study from the Journal of Business Research provides some significant evidence towards the efficacy of personalisation and the role that adequately disclosing privacy concerns can have on customer's willingness to disclose personal information for personalisation and marketing purposes.

The study conducted in partnership with a retailer invited 120,000 of their customers to participate in a survey and subsequently were given coupons via a personalised SMS as a reward for their participation.

First, the act of self-disclosure had a significant in-cremental impact on customers' purchase responses to personalized promotions, those who participated in self-disclosure had spent 34.01CNY per week more than those who had not self-disclosed. Second, the intensity of self-disclosure also had a positive effect on purchase responses in the personalized promotion stage. The more information that customers disclosed to the firm, the more likely they were to make a purchase when they received the later personalized promotion. Third, a prior combination of privacy assurance and personalization declaration encouraged customers to participate in the self-disclosure stage, leading to a 19% increase in the act of self-disclosure and a 5% increase in the intensity of self-disclosure.

This study sets some great groundwork and I hope to see more research in this area in the near future. For now it's given me a lot to think about in terms of how we can better communicate our privacy policies at work and how we can go about collection consent for various types of data collection.