Privacy Perceptions in India and US: A Mental Model Study

Directions references which are bold are references which need to be checked / verified. Details regarding US data has to be filled in table 2. Also some details provided here might not be actually presented in the final paper. This abstract is same as what we submitted as Abstract to TPRC. If needed we need to modify it. As members of the educated population in India are increasingly using the Internet, adopting new technologies such as camera phones, and acquiring credit cards, Indians are increasingly becoming exposed to many of the same privacy risks that have raised concerns in other parts of the world. Although some have interpreted the Indian constitution and some Indian laws as providing some privacy protections, there are no Indian laws that explicitly address data privacy. However, with the recent growth of the Indian business process outsourcing industry, there has been considerable interest in adopting laws that would provide legal safeguards for personal data handled by businesses. While many privacy studies have been done in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia, little research has been done to investigate attitudes about privacy in India. We conducted an exploratory study to gain an initial understanding of perceptions about privacy among Indians. We conducted 29 one-on-one ”mental model” interviews that asked people 16 open-ended questions related to privacy. A mental model is the symbolic representation of an idea that an individual uses to interact with the real world and to represent social relationships. The questions were organized into several categories: general understanding of privacy and security, security and privacy of computerized data, knowledge of risks and protection against privacy risks, knowledge and awareness about laws regarding privacy, knowledge of data sharing and selling in organizations and government, and