The Nuanced Nature of Trust and Privacy Control Adoption in the Context of Google

This paper investigates how trust towards service providers and the adoption of privacy controls belonging to two specific purposes (control over “sharing” vs. “usage” of data) vary based on users’ technical literacy. Towards that, we chose Google as the context and conducted an online survey across 209 Google users. Our results suggest that integrity and benevolence perceptions toward Google are significantly lower among technical participants than non-technical participants. While trust perceptions differ between non-technical adopters and non-adopters of privacy controls, no such difference is found among the technical counterparts. Notably, among the non-technical participants, the direction of trust affecting privacy control adoption is observed to be reversed based on the purpose of the controls. Using qualitative analysis, we extract trust-enhancing and dampening factors contributing to users’ trusting beliefs towards Google’s protection of user privacy. The implications of our findings for the design and promotion of privacy controls are discussed in the paper.