Research has demonstrated that users’ heuristic decision-making processes cause external factors like defaults and framing to influence the outcome of privacy decisions. Proponents of “privacy nudging” have proposed leveraging these effects to guide users’ decisions. Our research shows that defaults and framing not only influence the outcome of privacy decisions, but also the process of evaluating the contextual factors associated with the decision, effectively making the decision-making process more heuristic. In our analysis of an existing dataset of scenario-based smart home privacy decisions, we demonstrate that defaults and framing not only have a direct effect on participants’ decisions; they also moderate the effect of their cognitive appraisals of the presented scenarios on the decision. These results suggest that nudges like defaults and framing exacerbate the well-researched problem that people often employ heuristics rather than making deliberate privacy decisions, and that privacy-setting interfaces should avoid the effects of heuristic decision-making.

Previous studies have observed an intention-behavior gap that has been labeled the “privacy paradox”: people disclose personal information (behavior) despite expressing negative sharing intentions (in surveys). However, this phenomenon has not been studied in the Internet of Things (IoT) in which users’ personal information sharing is crucial for the functionality of the technology. We explore this phenomenon by comparing participants’ intentions (via a survey) with their actual behavior (via a privacy-setting interface) and controlling the data sharing device and storage. Furthermore, we explore the decision processes underlying these privacy decisions by measuring and manipulating these processes using an aspect listing task. We find a reversed intention-behavior gap in IoT: participants disclosed less (rather than more) information in the behavior condition than in the intention condition, an effect that was associated with fewer benefits than risk aspects listed in the behavior condition. The number and type of aspects listed fully mediated the effect of decision type (intention versus behavior) on the decision, which suggests that a risk-benefit calculation guided the privacy decision-making. Moreover, this reversed intention-behavior gap vanishes if we specifically ask participants to think about positive and negative aspects of the decision, as this allows them to consider both risks and benefits, irrespective of decision type.