Recent scholarship in business ethics has revealed the importance of privacy expectations as they relate to implicit privacy norms and the business practices that may violate these expectations. Yet, it is unclear how and when businesses may violate these expectations, factors that form or influence privacy expectations, or whether or not expectations have in fact been violated by company actions. This article reports the findings of three studies exploring how and when the corporate dissemination of consumer data violates privacy expectations. (...) The results indicate that consumer sentiment is more negative following intentional releases of sensitive consumer data, but the effect of data dissemination is more complex than that of company intentionality and data sensitivity alone. Companies can effectively set, and re-affirm, privacy expectations via consent procedures preceding and succeeding data dissemination notifications. Although implied consent has become more widely used in practice, we show how explicit consent outperforms implied consent in these regards. Importantly, this research provides process evidence that identifies perceived violation of privacy expectations as the underlying mechanism to explain the deleterious effects, on consumer sentiment, when company actions are misaligned with consumers’ privacy expectations. Ethical implications for companies collecting and disseminating consumer information are offered. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in philosophy, law, and information systems suggests that respecting privacy entails understanding the implicit privacy norms about what, why, and to whom information is shared within specific relationships. These social contracts are important to understand if firms are to adequately manage the privacy expectations of stakeholders. This paper explores a social contract approach to developing, acknowledging, and protecting privacy norms within specific contexts. While privacy as a social contract—a mutually beneficial agreement within a community about sharing and using (...) information—has been introduced theoretically and empirically, the full impact on firms of an alternative framework to respecting the privacy expectations of stakeholders has not been examined. The goal of this paper is to examine how privacy norms develop through social contract’s narrative, to redescribe privacy violations given the social contract approach, and to critically examine the role of business as a contractor in developing privacy norms. A social contract narrative dealing specifically with issues of privacy is an important next step in exploring a social contract approach to privacy. Here, the narrative is used to explain to analyze the dynamic process of privacy norm generation within particular communities. Based on this narrative, individuals within a given community discriminately share information with a particular set of obligations in mind as to who has access to the information and how it will be used. Rather than giving away privacy, individuals discriminately share information within a particular community and with norms governing the use of their information. Similar to contractual business ethics’ impact on global commerce in explaining how and why norms vary across global contexts, the social contract approach to privacy explains how and why norms vary across communities of actors. Focusing on agreements around privacy expectations shifts the responsibility of firms from adequate notification to the responsibility of firms as contractors to maintain a mutually beneficial and sustainable solution. (shrink)

Within a given conversation or information exchange, do privacy expectations change based on the technology used? Firms regularly require users, customers, and employees to shift existing relationships onto new information technology, yet little is known as about how technology impacts established privacy expectations and norms. Coworkers are asked to use new information technology, users of gmail are asked to use GoogleBuzz, patients and doctors are asked to record health records online, etc. Understanding how privacy expectations change, if at all, and (...) the mechanisms by which such a variance is produced will help organizations make such transitions. This paper examines whether and how privacy expectations change based on the technological platform of an information exchange. The results suggest that privacy expectations are significantly distinct when the information exchange is located on a novel technology as compared to a more established technology. Furthermore, this difference is best explained when modeled by a shift in privacy expectations rather than fully technology-specific privacy norms. These results suggest that privacy expectations online are connected to privacy offline with a different base privacy expectation. Surprisingly, out of the five locations tested, respondents consistently assign information on email the greatest privacy protection. In addition, while undergraduate students differ from non-undergraduates when assessing a social networking site, no difference is found when judging an exchange on email. In sum, the findings suggest that novel technology may introduce temporary conceptual muddles rather than permanent privacy vacuums. The results reported here challenge conventional views about how privacy expectations differ online versus offline. Traditionally, management scholarship examines privacy online or with a specific new technology platform in isolation and without reference to the same information exchange offline. However, in the present study, individuals appear to have a shift in their privacy expectations but retain similar factors and their relative importance—the privacy equation by which they form judgments—across technologies. These findings suggest that privacy scholarship should make use of existing privacy norms within contexts when analyzing and studying privacy in a new technological platform. (shrink)

Factorial surveys integrate elements of survey research and classical experiments. Using a large number of respondents in a controlled setting, FSs approximate complex and realistic judgment situations through so-called vignettes—that is, carefully designed descriptions of hypothetical people, social situations, or scenarios. Despite being rooted, and predominantly applied, in sociology, FSs are particularly promising for business and society scholars. Given the multiplicity, inherent complexity, and sometimes fuzziness of B&S research objects, conventional research methods inevitably reach their limits. This article, therefore, systematically (...) presents methodological and thematic opportunities for FS studies in B&S research. It is argued that FSs are well suited to dealing with the complex interplay of societal-, organizational-, and individual-level factors in B&S research and to studying the principles underlying human perceptions, attitudes, values, social norms, and behavior. The application of the FS method is illustrated based on a showcase example in the realm of socially responsible investments. As the literature on the conceptualization of FSs is limited, methodological challenges are addressed to guide B&S researchers past the common methodological pitfalls. (shrink)

Gender discrimination continues to plague organizations. While the advent of the Internet and the digitization of commerce have provided both a mechanism by which goods and services can be exchanged, as well as an efficient way for consumers to voice their opinions about retailers (i.e., via online rating systems), recent work has begun to uncover significant biases that manifest during the review process. In particular, it has been suggested that the gig-economy’s elimination of previously anonymous arm’s-length transactions may re-introduce bias (...) into perceptions of quality. In this work, we build upon research that has identified biases based on ascriptive characteristics in rating systems of ridesharing platforms. In doing so, we conduct an online experiment using a series of factorial vignettes to consider not only willingness to transact but post-transaction perceptions of quality. Findings suggest that female drivers are not penalized ex ante for taking on gender incongruent roles, i.e., driving, and experience no penalty when a rider reports a high-quality experience. However, conditional upon a lower quality experience, there is a disproportionate penalty for female drivers. Strikingly, we also observe that historic high quality does not serve as a buffer against such penalties, as prior literature would suggest. These findings underscore the challenges platforms face in ensuring their participants are being evaluated in a fair and impartial way, and highlight the difficulties present when non-employees (customers) are rating non-employees (drivers) of the firm. (shrink)

Privacy issues surrounding the use of social media sites have been apparent over the past ten years. Use of such sites, particularly Facebook, has been increasing and recently business organizations have begun using Facebook as a means of connecting with potential customers or clients. This paper presents an empirical study of perceived privacy violations to examine factors that influence the expectations of privacy on Facebook. Results of the study suggest that the more important Facebook is to users, the more likely (...) they are to perceive privacy violations and the more likely those violations are to be considered serious. Furthermore, how information is used is more important than the way this information is accessed. (shrink)