UCI-ISR-16-5, December 2016 Contextual Determinants for Users’ Acceptance of Personal Data Processing: A Multinational Analysis Pedro Leon 1 , Alfred Kobsa 2 , Carolyn Nguyen 3 1 Banco de México, pedro.leon@banxico.org.mx 2 Institute for Software Research, UC Irvine, Kobsa@uci.edu 3 Microsoft Corporation, Carolyn.Nguyen@microsoft.com Abstract. The importance of “context” in people’s privacy decisions is widely recognized, mostly in the area of inter-personal privacy. A comprehensive multinational analysis of what users consider to be the main contextual factors impacting their privacy decisions is still largely missing though, rendering it difficult to integrate context into data processing systems and privacy policy frameworks. We present a qualitative study in 4 countries followed by a large- scale (N=9,625) quantitative study in 8 countries aimed at identifying the contextual, attitudinal and demographic determinants that influence individuals' acceptance of scenarios involving the use of their personal data, and at gauging the relative influence of these determinants globally and country-wise. We develop parsimonious regression models to analyze the relative importance of different factors in different countries. The implications of such models in developing context and privacy aware systems and privacy policy frameworks are discussed. 1 Introduction Over the past decade, numerous privacy scholars have emphasized the importance of “context” in studying people’s privacy preferences and decisions (cf. [12, 15, 22, 23, 30]). They argued, e.g., that “privacy only exists in context” [12] and that “privacy should be conceptualized from the bottom up rather than the top down, from particular contexts rather than in the abstract” [30]. However, a comprehensive multinational bottom-up study to determine contextual factors that influence people’s acceptance or non-acceptance of personal data processing is largely lacking to date. Such a study should particularly answer the following questions: a) What do users see as the main context factors for their privacy decisions? b) To what extent do these factors influence people’s privacy decisions (and hence, which factors are more important or less important)? c) Is the influence of context factors on privacy decisions the same across different countries (i.e., is it universal), or rather not? The research described in this paper addresses these questions. We will first survey the existing literature on determinants of users’ privacy decisions. Our overview shows that comprehensive multinational empirical analyses from the users’ point of view are still largely missing, specifically in the area of information privacy. We then