When 25 Cents is Too Much: An Experiment on Willingness-To-Sell and Willingness-To-Protect Personal Information.

We present an empirical study of willingness-to-pay for protecting information (we term it willingness-to-protect) and willingness-to-accept a proposal to sell information (willingness-to-accept). We conducted the study in two parts. In the first part we presented the study participants with two yes/no offers, asking them to protect themselves against information release for a fixed amount of money, or offering them a fixed amount of money to release their information. In the second part we asked subjects to specify their maximum willingness-to-protect for personal data and their minimum willingness-to-accept for the release of personal information. Our results show a clear preference for money over data across the vast majority of participants in both the protection and the release scenarios, even when the monetary advantage of releasing or not protecting in the fixed amount choice situations is very small. In all hypothetical scenarios, we find that the average willingness-to-accept is dramatically higher than the average willingness-to-protect.