What Do Privacy Advertisements Communicate to Consumers?
Xiaoxin Shen, Eman Alashwali, Lorrie Faith Cranor
TL;DR
The paper investigates how privacy marketing communications are interpreted by consumers and their impact on attitudes, privacy awareness, and the actionability of advertised guidance. Using 24 semi-structured interviews across five campaigns (Apple, Samsung, WhatsApp, DuckDuckGo, and Twitter DataDash), the study finds that brief ads that highlight a single privacy feature with a simple metaphor most effectively raise feature awareness and can improve brand perception, while the privacy-themed game DataDash fails to instruct or motivate action. The results suggest that privacy campaigns can build positive brand associations and awareness but are not a robust method for teaching users how to use privacy features, particularly when the UI or switching costs hinder action. Practical implications include designing concise, easily alignable messages and features with real product settings, and using campaigns primarily for awareness and brand positioning rather than comprehensive privacy education.
Abstract
When companies release marketing materials aimed at promoting their privacy practices or highlighting specific privacy features, what do they actually communicate to consumers? In this paper, we explore the impact of privacy marketing on: (1) consumers' attitudes toward the organizations providing the campaigns, (2) overall privacy awareness, and (3) the actionability of suggested privacy advice. To this end, we investigated the impact of four privacy advertising videos and one privacy game published by five different technology companies. We conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with participants randomly assigned to view one or two of the videos or play the game. Our findings suggest that awareness of privacy features can contribute to positive perceptions of a company or its products. The ads we tested were more successful in communicating the advertised privacy features than the game we tested. We observed that advertising a single privacy feature using a single metaphor in a short ad increased awareness of the advertised feature. The game failed to communicate privacy features or motivate study participants to use the features. Our results also suggest that privacy campaigns can be useful for raising awareness about privacy features and improving brand image, but may not be the most effective way to teach viewers how to use privacy features.