Privacy4ICTD in India: Exploring Perceptions, Attitudes and Awareness about ICT Use

Several ICT studies give anecdotal evidences showing privacy to be an area of concern that can influence adoption of technology in the developing world. However, in-depth understanding of end users’ privacy attitudes and awareness is largely unexplored in developing countries such as India. We conducted a survey with 10,427 Indian citizens to bring forth various insights on privacy expectations and perceptions of end users. Our study explores end-users’ privacy expectations on three ICT platforms – mobile phones, OSN (Online Social Network), and government projects. Our results, though preliminary, show that users disproportionately consider financial details as personal information in comparison to medical records. Users heavily use mobile phones to store personal details and show high trust in mobile service providers for protecting the private data. However, users show concerns that mobile service provider may allow improper access of their personal information to third parties and government. We also find that female participants in the study were marginally more conscious of their privacy than males. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the largest privacy study which benchmarks privacy perceptions among Indian citizens. Understanding users’ privacy perceptions can help improve technology adoption and develop policies and laws for improving technology experience and enabling development for a better life in India.