Abstract: The aim of this study is to gain insights into the attitudes of the population towards big data practices and the factors influencing them. To this end, a nationwide survey (N = 1,331), representative of the population of Germany, addressed the attitudes about selected big data practices exemplified by four scenarios, which may have a direct impact on the personal lifestyle. The scenarios contained price discrimination in retail, credit scoring, differentiations in health insurance, and differentiations in employment. The attitudes about the scenarios were set into relation to demographic characteristics, personal value orientations, knowledge about computers and the internet, and general attitudes about privacy and data protection. Another focus of the study is on the institutional framework of privacy and data protection, because the realization of benefits or risks of big data practices for the population also depends on the knowledge about the rights the institutional framework provided to the population and the actual use of those rights. As results, several challenges for the framework by big data practices were confirmed, in particular for the elements of informed consent with privacy policies, purpose limitation, and the individuals’ rights to request information about the processing of personal data and to have these data corrected or erased.
TechnicalRemarks: TYPE OF SURVEY AND METHODS
The data set includes responses to a survey conducted by professionally trained interviewers of a social and market research company in the form of computer-aided telephone interviews (CATI) from 2017-02 to 2017-04. The target population was inhabitants of Germany aged 18 years and more, who were randomly selected by using the sampling approaches ADM eASYSAMPLe (based on the Gabler-Häder method) for landline connections and eASYMOBILe for mobile connections. The 1,331 completed questionnaires comprise 44.2 percent mobile and 55.8 percent landline phone respondents. Most questions had options to answer with a 5-point rating scale (Likert-like) anchored with ‘Fully agree’ to ‘Do not agree at all’, or ‘Very uncomfortable’ to ‘Very comfortable’, for instance. Responses by the interviewees were weighted to obtain a representation of the entire German population (variable ‘gewicht’ in the data sets). To this end, standard weighting procedures were applied to reduce differences between the sample and the entire population with regard to known rates of response and non-response depending on household size, age, gender, educational level, and place of residence.
RELATED PUBLICATION AND FURTHER DETAILS
The questionnaire, analysis and results will be published in the corresponding report (main text in English language, questionnaire in Appendix B in German language of the interviews and English translation). The report will be available as open access publication at KIT Scientific Publishing (https://www.ksp.kit.edu/).
Reference: Orwat, Carsten; Schankin, Andrea (2018): Attitudes towards big data practices and the institutional framework of privacy and data protection - A population survey, KIT Scientific Report 7753, Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing.
FILE FORMATS
The data set of responses is saved for the repository KITopen at 2018-11 in the following file formats: comma-separated values (.csv), tapulator-separated values (.dat), Excel (.xlx), Excel 2007 or newer (.xlxs), and SPSS Statistics (.sav).
The questionnaire is saved in the following file formats: comma-separated values (.csv), Excel (.xlx), Excel 2007 or newer (.xlxs), and Portable Document Format (.pdf).
PROJECT AND FUNDING
The survey is part of the project Assessing Big Data (ABIDA) (from 2015-03 to 2019-02), which receives funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany (grant no. 01IS15016A-F). http://www.abida.de
CONTACT
Carsten Orwat,
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,
Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis
orwat@kit.edu
Andrea Schankin,
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,
Institute of Telematics
andrea.schankin@kit.edu
