College students would give up their friends’ privacy for free pizza
College students would give up their friends’ privacy for
free pizza
These students don’t know the true cost of free pizza.
By KARI PAUL REPORTER Published: June 13, 2017 12:35 p.m.
ET
Americans may claim to value privacy, but their actions
suggest otherwise.
Nearly three-quarters of people (74%) in the U.S. believe
it’s “very important” to be in control of who can get information about them
and 60% say they would never feel comfortable sharing their email contacts.
However, the vast majority of college students (98%) gave away their friends’
emails when promised free pizza, a recent study of 3,108 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) students published the National Bureau of Economic
Research found.
“Whereas people say they care about privacy, they are
willing to relinquish private data quite easily when incentivized to do so,”
the study’s authors write. (The study’s main focus was establishing a
cryptocurrency community at MIT and measuring how students adopted the complex
technology.)
However, it also included an experiment in which students
were asked for the contacts of their closest friends. Half of the students were
given a small incentive in the form of an order of pizza to share with friends
and 98% of those shared emails. Fewer students — 94% — gave up friends’ email
addresses when not given any incentives. In the non-incentivized group, 6%
input fake emails to protect their friends’ identities. Not giving an email
address was also not an option.
This isn’t the first time a disparity between the beliefs
surrounding privacy protections and the actions upholding them has been proven.
More people than ever are susceptible to hacking and yet they routinely put
their online privacy at risk by doing things like accessing public Wi-Fi or
using weak passwords.
In fact, only 12% of internet users use any kind of
password manager like LastPass or 1Password, which save complex passwords on a
digital keychain to help people login securely, according to a report from
security provider SplashData. Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they rely
instead on memorizing easy passwords. Passwords “123456” and “password” topped
the list of emails and passwords most frequently cracked by hackers for the
second year in a row.
The latest study has a number of implications,
researchers concluded, particularly in the realm of privacy policies and
consent. Christian Catalini, an author on the study, said the results show
people either overstate how much they care about privacy when asked in surveys
or else that they do care about privacy but make rushed decisions online
without considering future consequences.
“If the second [conclusion] is true, then it becomes
important to rethink how ’consent’ is given in all these applications, mostly
to make sure that consumers are actually making a choice consistent with their
preferences,” he said. “As more of our lives are becoming digital, making sure
we have control over how and when our data is used will become more important
over time.”
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