Beyond Privacy Concerns: Examining Individual Interest in Privacy in the Machine Learning Era

The deployment of human-augmented machine learning (ML) systems has become a recommended organizational best practice. ML systems use algorithms that rely on training data labeled by human annotators. However, human involvement in reviewing and labeling consumers' voice data to train speech recognition systems for Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and the like has raised privacy concerns among consumers and privacy advocates. We use the enhanced APCO model as the theoretical lens to investigate how the disclosure of human involvement during the supervised machine learning process affects consumers' privacy decision making. In a scenario-based experiment with 499 participants, we present various company privacy policies to participants to examine their trust and privacy considerations, then ask them to share reasons why they would or would not opt in to share their voice data to train a companies' voice recognition software. We find that the perception of human involvement in the ML training process significantly influences participants' privacy-related concerns, which thereby mediate their decisions to share their voice data. Furthermore, we manipulate four factors of a privacy policy to operationalize various cognitive biases actively present in the minds of consumers and find that default trust and salience biases significantly affect participants' privacy decision making. Our results provide a deeper contextualized understanding of privacy-related concerns that may arise in human-augmented ML system configurations and highlight the managerial importance of considering the role of human involvement in supervised machine learning settings. Importantly, we introduce perceived human involvement as a new construct to the information privacy discourse. Although ubiquitous data collection and increased privacy breaches have elevated the reported concerns of consumers, consumers' behaviors do not always match their stated privacy concerns. Researchers refer to this as the privacy paradox, and decades of information privacy research have identified a myriad of explanations why this paradox occurs. Yet the underlying crux of the explanations presumes privacy concern to be the appropriate proxy to measure privacy attitude and compare with actual privacy behavior. Often, privacy concerns are situational and can be elicited through the setup of boundary conditions and the framing of different privacy scenarios. Drawing on the cognitive model of empowerment and interest, we propose a multidimensional privacy interest construct that captures consumers' situational and dispositional attitudes toward privacy, which can serve as a more robust measure in conditions leading to the privacy paradox. We define privacy interest as a consumer's general feeling toward reengaging particular behaviors that increase their information privacy. This construct comprises four dimensions—impact, awareness, meaningfulness, and competence—and is conceptualized as a consumer's assessment of contextual factors affecting their privacy perceptions and their global predisposition to respond to those factors. Importantly, interest was originally included in the privacy calculus but is largely absent in privacy studies and theoretical conceptualizations. Following MacKenzie et al. (2011), we developed and empirically validated a privacy interest scale. This study contributes to privacy research and practice by reconceptualizing a construct in the original privacy calculus theory and offering a renewed theoretical lens through which to view consumers' privacy attitudes and behaviors.