With technological advances, governments and companies gain opportunities to collect data to provide public benefits. However, such data collections and uses need to fulfill ethical standards and comply with citizens’ privacy preferences, which may vary across several dimensions. The Comparative Privacy Research Framework suggests specific comparative dimensions that may shape such privacy-related perceptions. I propose how to integrate into this framework a specific meso-level perspective for concisely operationalizing data uses context-specifically: the privacy theory of contextual integrity, developed by Helen Nissenbaum. This article presents an empirical application of this approach by investigating specific data use scenarios across countries, while simultaneously considering temporal, international, and individual-level variation. To this end, an online survey experiment was conducted in three countries (Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom) in December 2022 and May 2023. In this experiment, respondents rated the appropriateness of fictitious data use scenarios. The scenarios varied by data type, data recipients, and conditions of data use. The results show that the effects of contextual parameters vary across countries to different degrees. Respondents react particularly sensitively to changes in data types, with health data being overall most accepted to be used. The relative acceptance of the data recipients clearly varies across countries. Country-level individualism is not consistently related to the desired level of control over data. These findings highlight the usefulness of contextual integrity to unmask meso-level, context-specific variations in privacy attitudes across countries. A meso-level perspective that operationalizes data uses according to contextual integrity can therefore inform comparative privacy research and privacy-related policymaking.

中文翻译：

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对使用数据促进公共利益的态度：通过纵向调查实验调查德国、西班牙和英国的背景特定差异


随着技术的进步，政府和公司有机会收集数据以提供公共利益。但是，此类数据收集和使用需要满足道德标准并遵守公民的隐私偏好，这在多个维度上可能会有所不同。比较隐私研究框架提出了可能影响此类隐私相关看法的特定比较维度。我建议如何将一个特定的中观层面的视角整合到这个框架中，以便简洁地操作特定于上下文的数据：由 Helen Nissenbaum 开发的上下文完整性隐私理论。本文通过调查各国的特定数据使用场景，同时考虑时间、国际和个人层面的变化，介绍了这种方法的实证应用。为此，我们于 2022 年 12 月和 2023 年 5 月在三个国家（德国、西班牙和英国）进行了一项在线调查实验。在这个实验中，受访者对虚构数据使用场景的适当性进行了评分。这些方案因数据类型、数据接收者和数据使用条件而异。结果表明，背景参数的影响因国家而异。受访者对数据类型的变化反应特别敏感，总体而言，健康数据最被接受使用。数据接收者的相对接受度显然因国家/地区而异。国家层面的个人主义并不总是与期望的数据控制水平相关。这些发现强调了上下文完整性对于揭示不同国家/地区隐私态度的中观级别、特定上下文差异的有用性。 因此，根据上下文完整性操作数据使用的中观层面视角可以为比较隐私研究和隐私相关政策制定提供信息。