Title
On the Difficulties of Incentivizing Online Privacy through Transparency: A Qualitative Survey of the German Health Insurance Market.
Abstract
Today, online privacy is the domain of regulatory measures and privacy-enhancing technologies. Transparency in the form of external and public assessments has been proposed for improving privacy and security because it exposes otherwise hidden deficiencies. Previous work has studied privacy attitudes and behavior of consumers. However, little is known on how organizations react to measures that employ public naming and shaming as an incentive for improvement. We performed the first study on this aspect by conducting a qualitative survey with 152 German health insurers. We scanned their websites with PrivacyScore.org to generate a public ranking and confronted the insurers with the results. We obtained a response rate of 27%. Responses ranged from positive feedback to legal threats. Only 12% of the sites - mostly non-responders - improved during our study. Our results show that insurers struggle due to unawareness, reluctance, and incapability, and demonstrate the general difficulties of transparency-based approaches.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
Wirtschaftsinformatik
Transparency (graphic),Internet privacy,Internet security,Response rate (survey),Incentive,Ranking,Computer science,Health insurance,Quasi-experiment,German
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1811.12775
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Max Maass185.16
Nicolas Walter200.34
Dominik Herrmann318116.84
Matthias Hollick475097.29