Comparing privacy attitudes of knowledge workers in the U.S. and India

We 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 our work largely confirmed these findings, we found unexpectedly that knowledge workers in India expressed higher interpersonal privacy concerns compared with their U.S. colleagues. Our study 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. Our findings highlight the challenges in satisfying privacy needs when individuals and teams collaborate with knowledge workers in India. An understanding of these issues is important for building and deploying systems for intercultural collaboration that can accommodate differences in privacy concerns.