The impact of demographic factors on perceived data privacy in personalized advertising

Abstract

This thesis investigates how demographic factors, such as age, gender, education and income, influence the consumers’ perceptions on data privacy especially in the context of personalized advertising. Since scholars have previously shown that privacy concerns and willingness to share personal data are significantly influenced by demographics, this study is constructed to inspect how these variables shape attitudes and behaviours regarding data collection.

Earlier research has mainly used age and gender as explanatory demographics, whereas income and education level have been left with less attention. Thus, this study pursues to address this research gap by incorporating a broader demographic perspective. This is achieved by including income and education level into the study as control variables.

This thesis enables a quantitative research approach to metrically evaluate the differences among control groups. The research data is collected through an online survey crafted to gather demographic information and opinions on data privacy and personalized advertising related survey questions. Descriptive analytics and single-factor ANOVA analysis is employed to distinguish trends between privacy concerns and demographic factors.

The main findings indicate that while all demographic variables did have an influence on consumer perceptions on some degree, education proved to be the most prominent and strongly associated with privacy concerns. Statistically significant results were observed especially regarding questions related to privacy concerns which proved to portray visible trends amongst control groups.

This research provides insights to the understanding of how specific demographic characteristics shape consumer perceptions of data privacy. These findings can help marketers and businesses to design online marketing practices that address the concerns and needs of the specific demographics and consumer profiles. Furthermore, this may help alleviate consumer concerns related to data privacy and build greater trust in digital marketing practices.