Abstract

     While there is increasing global attention to data privacy, most of their current theoretical understanding is based on research conducted in a few countries. Prior work argues that people’s cultural backgrounds might shape their privacy concerns; thus, we could expect people from different world regions to conceptualize them in diverse ways. We collected and analyzed a large-scale dataset of tweets about the #CambridgeAnalytica scandal in Spanish and English to start exploring this hypothesis. We employed word embeddings and qualitative analysis to identify which information privacy concerns are present and characterize language and regional differences in emphasis on these concerns. Our results suggest that related concepts, such as regulations, can be added to current information privacy frameworks. We also observe a greater emphasis on data collection in English than in Spanish. Additionally, data from North America exhibits a narrower focus on awareness compared to other regions under study. Our results call for more diverse sources of data and nuanced analysis of data privacy concerns around the globe.

Introduction

     The right to control one’s personal information has gained significant importance lately (Lee et al. 2019). Indeed, 58% of the countries have data protection and privacy legislation, while another 10% have drafted legislation about it (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2020). This broad interest is related to the massive amount of personal data collected by information systems and the risk that such information could be wrongly distributed online (Lee et al. 2019).

     The study of information privacy has advanced our understanding of individuals’ concerns regarding organizational practices associated with collecting and using their personal information (Smith et al. 1996). However, a literature review revealed a strong bias towards USA-centered studies across privacy concerns literature and warned about the limitations to generalizability this entails (Belanger ´ and Crossler 2011; Okazaki et al. 2020). The review’s authors hypothesized that individuals from different world regions have diverse cultures, values, and laws, which can, in turn, result in different conceptualizations of information privacy and its impacts (Belanger and Crossler ´ ۲۰۱۱; Mohammed and Tejay 2017). To study these differences, privacy research has often relied on survey-based studies (Cockcroft and Rekker 2016). For example, a questionnaire was applied to explore differences in privacy perceptions between Facebook users from Germany and the USA (Krasnova and Veltri 2010), and a cross-national survey was conducted to evaluate information attitudes of consumers in the USA and Brazil (Markos et al. 2017). These multi-country privacy studies have had limited sample sizes, which makes the results difficult to generalize (Lee et al. 2019; Huang and Bashir 2016). They also tend to be focused on one or two cultures, usually including the USA (Cockcroft and Rekker 2016). Hence, multi-country information privacy research is still needed to extend our understanding of this increasingly relevant topic around the globe (Adu et al. 2019; Zou et al. 2018).

Conclusion

     We conducted a cross-language and cross-regional study on social media content about a major data privacy leakage: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We categorized our Twitter data into two different languages and four geographical regions.

     Our results shed light on language and regional differences on information privacy concerns by 1) creating word embeddings by language and world regions to leverage social media data about a data breach scandal, 2) conducting open coding and content analysis of the semantic contexts (generated by the embeddings) of privacy-related keywords, 3) mapping the results to a well-known information privacy framework, and (4) conducting a comparative analysis across two languages and four world regions.

     We found that data in English shows a broader emphasis on data collection , while data from North America shows the smallest emphasis on awareness. In turn, data from Latin America has the broadest emphasis on awareness. We discuss how our findings extend current conceptualizations of information privacy concerns, and how they might relate to regulations about personal data usage in the regions we analyzed.