Does privacy paradox survive when context matters?

Abstract

Purpose. To assess whether the privacy paradox persists when accounting for contextual information and transparency in digital services, and to evaluate the stability of privacy preferences across everyday life, social media, and digital finance. Methodology. A questionnaire survey of 400 respondents was conducted. Indices of privacy propensity in three domains and indices of preference for privacy over convenience and over undefined future benefits were constructed on Likert scales and analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, t-tests, and regression models. Findings. Privacy propensities differ significantly across contexts and correlate only weakly with each other. At the same time, all three indices of propensity for privacy are strongly and statistically significantly related to the preference for privacy over functionality when the choice is formulated in a clear, context-rich way, which supports the conclusion that the privacy paradox in this setting appears in a weak form and that context acts as a boundary line between the privacy paradox and more preference-consistent choices. That said, the explanatory power of the models remains modest and does not justify a strong rational-choice interpretation. Originality. The study jointly examines three context‑distant privacy domains and explicitly contrasts abstract and contextualized privacy-functionality trade-offs, showing that context acts as a boundary condition between the privacy paradox and rational, preference-consistent choice. In contrast to the authors’ previous work on the privacy paradox in Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) design and trust in them, this article extends the analysis to three non‑CBDC domains of everyday life. This includes social media, and digital finance, and explicitly contrasts abstract and context‑rich privacy-functionality trade‑offs within a single empirical design. Practical value. The results suggest that clearer and more context-rich privacy choices are associated with greater preference consistency, which highlights the potential value of more transparent privacy policies and user interfaces in digital services. For regulators, the findings provide only preliminary support for transparency-oriented approaches to privacy policy, as the cross-sectional design and non-probabilistic sample do not allow strong causal or normative conclusions.