The Privacy Attitudes Questionnaire (PAQ): Initial Development and Validation

Abstract

Privacy has been identified as a key issue in a variety of domains, including electronic commerce and public policy. While there are many discussions of privacy issues from a legal and policy perspective, there is little information on the structure of privacy as a psychometric construct. Our goal is to develop a method for measuring attitudes towards privacy that can guide the design and personalization of services. This paper reports on the development of an initial version of the PAQ. Four privacy attitudes are identified based on the factor structure of the PAQ. Cluster analysis is used to identify potential stereotypes with respect to attitudes towards privacy amongst different groups of people. Version 1.0 of the PAQ is presented in an Appendix as a 36 item questionnaire that measures the four privacy attitudes of personal information, monitoring, exposure and protection.