Informational Privacy Survey Project

Privacy Matters: Information Privacy among Low-Income Households in India

In recent years, India has seen increasing levels of digitisation in operations and service delivery. Governments are experimenting with digitising welfare benefits and service delivery to reduce corruption and improve targeting. This digitisation of services, however, is contingent on how confident and comfortable consumers feel in sharing their personal data with service providers and governments. This confidence and comfort of the consumer is directly related to how secure and safe they feel in sharing personal data with providers and government agencies.

In 2017, Dvara Research collaborated with CGAP and Dalberg Design on a qualitative primary study to understand how individuals from varied social and economic contexts shared their personal data with governments and service providers. The deeply qualitative study benefitted from observing privacy attitudes of remote rural and peri-urban low-income users. That study revealed that the digital ecosystem appeared unfamiliar to the respondents. Though they appreciated the benefits that could accrue by sharing their personal data, they felt ill-equipped to deal with any harms that may arise from its misuse. Though very telling, the study was limited in its scale.

Between August 2019 – March 2020, we surveyed the privacy choices of 2712, low-income respondents, roughly equally divided into women and men, from two Indian states- Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

This Study, undertaken in collaboration with the IFMR Graduate School of Business at Krea University, seeks to uncover low-income individuals’ awareness around the processing of their personal data, their reported preferences in sharing personal information with different entities and the reasons behind those choices with limitations of traditional and digital literacy.

The survey instrument seeks to test if individuals’ informational privacy preferences vary with the type of information being shared and the entity with whom it is being shared. It also tests individuals’ perceptions of their awareness of how their personal data is being processed by different entities.

Below, we present our findings in the context of four counterparties: Financial Institutions (FI), Local Government (LG), Online Service Providers (OSP) and Telecom Providers (TCP).