While digital divide studies primarily focused on access to information and communications technology (ICT) in the past, its influence on other associated dimensions such as privacy is becoming critical with a far-reaching impact on the people and society. For example, the various levels of government legislation and compliance on information privacy worldwide have created a new era of digital divide in the privacy preservation domain. In this article, the concept "digital privacy divide (DPD)" is introduced to describe the perceived gap in the privacy preservation of individuals based on the geopolitical location of different countries. To better understand the DPD phenomenon, we created an online questionnaire and collected answers from more than 700 respondents from four different countries (the United States, Germany, Bangladesh, and India) who come from two distinct cultural orientations as per Hofstede's individualist vs. collectivist society. However, our results revealed some interesting findings. DPD does not depend on Hofstede's cultural orientation of the countries. For example, individuals residing in Germany and Bangladesh share similar privacy concerns, while there is a significant similarity among individuals residing in the United States and India. Moreover, while most respondents acknowledge the importance of privacy legislation to protect their digital privacy, they do not mind their governments to allow domestic companies and organizations collecting personal data on individuals residing outside their countries, if there are economic, employment, and crime prevention benefits. These results suggest a social dilemma in the perceived privacy preservation, which could be dependent on many other contextual factors beyond government legislation and countries' cultural orientation.
翻译:虽然数字鸿沟研究过去主要侧重于获取信息和通信技术(ICT),但其对隐私等其他相关层面的影响正在变得至关重要,对人民和社会产生了深远的影响,例如,世界各地各级政府的立法和遵守信息隐私权,在隐私保护领域创造了数字鸿沟的新时代,在这一条中,“数字隐私鸿沟(DPD)”的概念用于描述基于不同国家地缘政治位置的个人在隐私保护方面存在的明显差距。为了更好地了解DPD现象,我们制作了一个在线问卷,并收集了来自四个不同国家(美国、德国、孟加拉国和印度)的700多名答复者的答复,这些答复者来自Hofsstede的个人主义与集体主义社会之间的两种不同的文化取向。然而,我们的结果揭示了一些有趣的发现。DDDDD并不取决于Hofsstede的各国文化取向。例如,居住在德国和孟加拉国的个人可能有着类似的隐私关切,而居住在美国和印度的个人之间有着非常相似的相似性。此外,尽管大多数答复者都承认隐私立法的重要性,而且他们认为,其国内的隐私立法也意味着,他们的国家的隐私立法必须保护其国内的预防结果。