A Survey on Trust and Privacy Negotiability in the Norwegian Mobile Telecom Market

We investigate, by method of statistical survey, people's attitudes toward privacy, trust and personal information sharing in the context of price discrimination effects in the mobile telecom market, by asking a selection of 546 individuals, a sample size that is sufficient to be representative for the Norwegian mobile market of consumers. Common wisdom tells that people value their privacy, but not much facts have been collected about how much people value privacy, say, as consumers of specific services in the mobile market. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that individuals will differ in their negotiability of personal information vs price of service. In this study, we measure a strong privacy negotiability correlated to age and income, thus confirming common intuition about this. We find that technically assuring anonymity of service will significantly affect and facilitate the user's willingness to release personal information to the service provider, in particular with respect to information about specific buying preferences and frequent travel destinations. Somewhat surprising, a practice of targeted advertisement in exchange for lower mobile service price is acceptable to about half the population.