Retailers, marketers, IT executives, and privacy officers spend quite a bit of time wondering why so many members of the public insist on divulging immensely personal (and valuable) details about themselves online. Now a recent article from Harvard Business School will leave you even more unsettled: the more slap-dash and downright sketchy a website looks, the more willing we are to share personal information with no thought about security. Go figure.
The paper, “The Impact of Relative Standards on the Propensity to Disclose,” started as a thought exercise while HBS marketing professor Leslie John was still studying at Carnegie Mellon University and someone introduced her to Facebook. “I didn’t understand why people were putting all this information out there,” John said in the HBS article. “It was very bizarre to me.” You and me both, professor.
