The Relationship between Privacy Notice Formats and Consumer Disclosure Decisions: A Quantitative Study

In the Data Era, the future success of many businesses will heavily depend on the business’ ability to collect and process consumer personal information. Business leaders must understand and implement practices that increase consumer trust to influence their willingness to disclose their information. The problem addressed by this study is many consumers do not trust online service providers with their personal information, and as a result, have refrained from engaging in online activities. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to understand how consumers use privacy notices when deciding to share their personal information with online businesses. A sample of 288 adult privacy pragmatists were randomly assigned to read one of three privacy notice formats, a full-text format, a layered text format, or a standardized table format, and asked to answer a survey. A one-way analysis of variance was used to test the hypotheses. This study F(8, 55) = 2.08, p = .04 found a relationship between privacy notice type and consumer trust (η = .22, p = .001). No relationship was found between privacy notice type and a consumer’s perceived protection belief (η = .14, p = .07), perceived risk belief (η = .05, p = .70), or likeliness to disclose (η = .11, p = .20). Practitioners should focus factors that will encourage disclosure collect consumer personal information other than website privacy notice format. Further research is needed to study these relationships in different online contexts and with different populations.