A proposed method for personal attributes disclosure valuation: A study on personal attributes disclosure in Thailand

Personal information has become an important asset for service providers in this data-driven age, with repeated requests for large amounts of personal information from consumers. These personal data information collection activities raise privacy concerns for the customers. Service providers occasionally request personal information which consumers feel uncomfortable to disclose. Several recent studies showed that consumers reject these collection activities as they feel uncomfortable about disclosing personal information. Service providers must treat carefully here. Every consumer has different perspectives and judgements regarding the value of each personal attribute; the data privacy issue is very complex. This study aimed to estimate a disclosure value for each personal attribute, and provide assistance to service providers. We used a questionnaire result that collected consumers' feelings when they were asked to disclose each personal attribute. We used a probability technique to determine the relation of disclosure value among personal attributes and graph mining techniques were used to construct a tree graph. Then, we proposed a method to estimate the value of personal attribute disclosure and analysed a case study using our proposed method. The results showed the differences in the value of personal attribute disclosure between different groups of consumers.