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Top1. Introduction
Surveillance is the collection and usage of personal data, with or without consent, for purposes of influence over the individual and the society (Dinev, Hart, & Mullen, 2008). With the advent of new technologies on the Internet and the increasing ubiquity of cameras in public places, surveillance by the state has increased dramatically and been motivated by events such as 9/11 and Covid-19 (Maytin et al., 2021; Zaia, 2019). Surveillance by private corporations or companies has also increased significantly for purposes of targeted advertising and influence on consumers. Contemporary surveillance technologies cover potentially any activity over the Internet, and the ubiquity of cameras covers the non-cyber aspect of our lives (Commission, 2019).
The awareness of being surveilled underwent a significant rise after the public disclosures of Edward Snowden (Lyon, 2015). However, theories of perceptions of surveillance are still under development. One conceptualization of aspects of surveillance derives from a theory of legal consciousness where the Law is considered to be either something to be resisted; or as an omnipotent, majestic force that must be conformed before; or, finally, the Law is considered to be a mutable body that can be engaged with, for the benefit of the individual (Ewick & Silbey, 1998). This framework is adapted in (Zaia, 2019) to apply to surveillance, so that there are three basic dimensions to surveillance perception: resisting surveillance, accepting it as inevitable, or working around it by understanding the existing surveillance methods.
To the best of our knowledge, there is very little work on defining these three aspects of surveillance perception as psychometric constructs. There is also very little work we know of that tests the antecedent drivers of the perception of surveillance. In this work, we create and psychometrically test constructs that represent different aspects of surveillance perception. We investigate behavioral inhibition, a temperamental trait, as an antecedent to surveillance perceptions. We also study education level and geographic (US/non-US) location as possible drivers of surveillance perceptions.
The privacy paradox is a well-studied phenomenon in the privacy concern literature (Auxier et al., 2019; Barnes, 2006; Trepte, Dienlin, & Reinecke, 2014; Utz & Krämer, 2009). An important dimension of the paradox is that while individuals strongly assert their concerns for the invasion of their privacy due to surveillance technologies, they continue to share large amounts of private information on the Internet for small benefits. There have been some attempts to tease out the differences between concerns about privacy concern and attitudes towards privacy (Barth, de Jong, Junger, Hartel, & Roppelt, 2019; Dienlin & Trepte, 2015) but it still remains an open question. In this work we revisit the privacy paradox and test if it exists in the perceptions of our subjects.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents background work and development of our model. Section 3 shows the data collection and testing of the model and analysis of findings. Section 4 discusses our findings and we conclude in section 5.