Privacy Choice During Crisis
Anindya Ghose, Beibei Li, Meghanath Macha, Chenshuo Sun, Natasha Zhang Foutz
Management Science · 2026 · Volume 72 · Issue 6
Abstract
Consumers’ privacy choice between withholding and sharing personal data may change during crises. Crises not only alter personal considerations of benefits and costs of this choice, but also trigger societal considerations, such as use of shared data in crisis management. Although the literature on privacy choice has focused on personal considerations, research on how this choice is influenced by broader circumstances remains sparse. We address this topic by leveraging newly available location big data and a global public health crisis as a natural shock. Analyzing 22 billion raw records of intertemporal individual-level mobile location data across a wide spectrum of cities in the United States, we present the first large-scale evidence that opt-out reduces during a crisis, and societal, beyond personal, considerations might have influenced consumers’ privacy choices. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, information systems. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00017 .
Keywords
consumer privacy, COVID-19, crisis, location data, mobility
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