Comparing Privacy Attitudes of Knowledge Workers in the U.S. and India

The authors compared privacy attitudes of knowledge workers from the U.S. and India who were involved in a collaborative software development project distributed across five sites of a multinational corporation. Prior studies on consumer privacy suggest that privacy concerns in India are lower than those in the U.S. While the work largely confirmed these findings, they found unexpectedly that knowledge workers in India expressed higher interpersonal privacy concerns compared with their U.S. colleagues. The paper points to a number of explanatory factors for the elevated privacy concerns in the Indian knowledge workplace: Nature of interpersonal relationships, associations with privacy, competition among team members, management style and hierarchy, and differences in the physical characteristics of the workplace.