Rethinking consumers' data sharing decisions with the emergence of multi-party computation: An experimental design for evaluation

Consumers are increasingly reluctant to share their personal data with businesses due to mounting concerns over privacy and control. Emerging privacy-enhancing technologies like multi-party computation (MPC), which allows generating insights while consumers retain data control, are challenging the current understanding of why consumers share their data. In this research-in-progress paper, we develop and evaluate an instrument and experimental design to investigate the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data and its antecedents. Preliminary analysis from a pre-study (N=300) indicates a good fit for our model. Also, MPC enhances consumers’ control and trust while reducing privacy concerns and risk, ultimately increasing data sharing willingness. The findings suggest that privacy-enhancing technologies significantly affect both the willingness to share data itself and its typical antecedents. The next step will conduct a large-scale online experiment using the developed instruments to evaluate further the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data.