Too much information

Ian Leslie in Aeon: “Our instincts for privacy evolved in tribal societies where walls didn’t exist. No wonder we are hopeless oversharers…A few years ago George Loewenstein, professor of behavioural economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, set out to investigate how people think about the consequences of their privacy choices on the internet. He soon concluded that they don’t….‘Thinking about online privacy doesn’t come naturally to us,’ Loewenstein told me when I spoke to him on the phone. ‘Nothing in our evolution or culture has equipped us to deal with it.’…We might be particularly prone to disclosing private information to a well-designed digital interface, making an unconscious and often unwise association between ease-of-use and safety. …This is not the only way our deeply embedded real-world instincts can backfire online. Take our rather noble instinct for reciprocity: returning a favour. If I reveal personal information to you, you’re more likely to reveal something to me. This works reasonably well when you can see my face and make a judgment about how likely I am to betray your confidence…Giving people more control over their privacy choices won’t solve these deeper problems. Indeed, Loewenstein found evidence for a ‘control paradox’. Just as many people mistakenly think that driving is safer than flying because they feel they have more control over it, so giving people more privacy settings to fiddle with makes them worry less about what they actually divulge.”