A Multi-Technique Approach to Exploring the Main Influences of Information Exchange Monitoring Tolerance

Abstract

The privacy and security of online transactions and information exchange has always been a critical issue of e-commerce. However, there is a certain level of tolerance (a share of 36%) when it comes to so-called governments’ rights to monitor electronic mail messages and other information exchange as resulting from the answers of respondents from 51 countries in the latest wave (2017–2020) of the World Values Survey. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to discover the most significant influences associated with this type of tolerance and even causal relationships. The variables have been selected and analyzed in many rounds (Adaptive Boosting, LASSO, mixed-effects modeling, and different regressions) with the aid of a private cloud. The results confirmed most hypotheses regarding the overwhelming role of trust, public surveillance acceptance, and some attitudes indicating conscientiousness, altruistic behavior, and gender discrimination acceptance in models with good-to-excellent classification accuracy. A generated prediction nomogram included 10 ten most resilient influences. Another one contained only 5 of these 10 that acted more as determinants resisting reverse causality checks. In addition, some sociodemographic controls indicated significant variables afferent to the highest education level attained, settlement size, and marital status. The paper’s novelty stands on many robust techniques supporting randomly and nonrandomly cross-validated and fully reproducible results based on a large amount and variety of evidence. The findings also represent a step forward in research related to privacy and security issues in e-commerce.