The data indicates that individuals demonstrate a gradation of privacy concerns that escalate from personal circumstances to financial information, with location privacy as a midpoint in the sensitivity spectrum. Previous research suggests that cultural background and country of origin can influence privacy concerns (Milberg et al., 2000; Pentina et al., 2016). For instance, Markos et al. (2017) document that U.S. consumers exhibit greater wariness about information disclosure and lower willingness to share information with marketers compared to Brazilian consumers. Although our survey is not cross-national, we explore whether international experience affects privacy preferences within our sample. We analyze whether overseas education experience influences privacy attitudes by constructing a binary variable (Overseas Edu) that equals one for respondents who reported studying abroad. Finally, the experiments provided an understanding of how much anonymity matters when compared with illiquidity risk and expected return.
The dependent variable in our analysis encompasses various categories of privacy preferences, including age privacy, marriage privacy, location privacy, etc. The key independent variable is Risk Attitude, which is the qualitative measurement of risk aversion attitudes, with higher values suggesting a stronger aversion to risk. The control variables include a set of dummies such as Age, Male, Married, Rural Resident, and Foreigner. The variable of Financial Literacy scores is derived from participants’ responses.Footnote 6 We include city dummy variables to control for city fixed effects. This accounts for unobserved heterogeneity across participants’ cities of residence.
We extend our analysis beyond stated privacy preferences to examine actual disclosure behavior, focusing on participants’ non-disclosure decisions in real survey situations. While most survey items required responses, we provided non-disclosure options for questions about assets and debt. Specifically, participants could select “Prefer not to disclose” when asked about their property ownership and debt amount. Given that the experiments confirm that anonymity matters, two considerations follow.
We also analyze how risk attitudes relate to real-world non-disclosure actions and the privacy paradox. First, it extends beyond demographic factors to examine how risk attitudes—a central psychological component of consumer decision-making—influence privacy preferences. While risk attitudes are known to affect various consumer behaviors (Choi et al., 2022; Roca Paz & Uebelmesser, 2021), their role in privacy choices remains understudied, partly due to data limitations.
We conduct a randomised survey experiment and find that privacy protection is among the key features to consider in the design of CBDC. Across these financial domains, there was a consistently higher sensitivity, with approximately 30%-40% of respondents indicating high or some sensitivity toward financial privacy. The highest sensitivity level was observed in income privacy and asset privacy, with 18.94% highly sensitive and 21.37% sensitive to income information.
This might involve tiered privacy protection options or mandatory risk-benefit disclosures for data collection practices. Platforms could offer risk attitude assessments to users, using the results to suggest tailored default privacy settings. Policymakers could also design education initiatives that address different risk attitudes, potentially increasing the effectiveness of privacy awareness efforts. By acknowledging the diversity in how consumers approach privacy, tailored interventions that align with regulatory aims can be developed to empower consumers to make more informed decisions that reflect their personal preferences. As prior work has shown that individuals’ privacy choices may differ across age cohorts, educational backgrounds, and other demographics, this study also controls the confluence of these personal attributes in shaping privacy behaviors.
