Privacy versus accessibility: The impact of situationally conditioned belief

The information age we are living in and the technology that supports it, raises new ethical concerns. Among these concerns are privacy — the rights of individuals to withold information they consider sensitive, and accessibility — the rights of individuals to obtain information that is relevant to the decisions they must make. Arguments about potential impacts of information technology on privacy and accessibility mask and underlying conflict — that one person's beliefs about their right to relevant information is likely to conflict with another person's belief's about their right to withold information they consider sensitive. This paper proposes that the conflict is likely to be a function of the role the individuals plays in the decision making situation — situationally conditioned belief (SCB) — rather than a function of the person's underlying ethical values.This paper presents an empirical study involving information privacy and accessibility in routine business and market decisions, designed to reveal the presence of SCBs. The results indicate that SCBs cause a gap in beliefs about information accessibility and privacy. Impacts of the SCB gap are discussed. A negotiation technique called information exchange is suggested as a means of closing the SCB gap in routine business and market transactions. Dr. Laura Lally received her Ph.D. in Information Systems. Dr. Lally pursues research on the impacts of information technology on a nation's culture, on business profitability, and on the ethical choices faced by individuals. She has published articles in Decision Sciences, the Information Society, the Journal of Global Information Management and in the Journal of End User Computing. She is currently investigating the risk factors involved in process reengineering under a grant from the National Science Foundation.