To Opt-In or Opt-Out? It Depends on the Question.(Industry Trend or Event)

Permission marketing requires consumers' consent before a Web site can track them with cookies, or send them marketing email, or sell their data to another company. Yet a study by Cyber Dialogue found that 69% of U.S. Internet users did not know they had given their consent to be included on email distribution lists. Here's how it's done: Using the right combination of question framing and default answer, an online organization can almost guarantee it will get the consent of nearly every visitor to its site. Although lists of people who have supposedly opted-in for permission marketing schemes are valuable sources of revenue for Web sites, high response rates alone do not mean these lists contain valuable customers.

We systematically explored the influence of question framing and response defaults on consumers' apparent privacy preferences in two online experiments detailed in [1]. The participants in these experiments were members of the Wharton Virtual Test Market, an online panel of over 30,000 Internet users representative of the U.S. Internet population. The results of our experiments highlight the need for all online consumers to pay close attention to what they agree to when they send responses to a Web site.

If consumers had fixed policies about the privacy. of their data, then asking them to opt-out or opt-in to a Web site's privacy policy would make no difference to their answer. However, evidence suggests that most consumers decide how much of their private information to release to a site on a case-by-case basis. The problem with making up your mind on the spot, though, is the answers you give are often influenced by the way questions are asked, as a long history of decision-making research shows [2]. We found that simply framing the question as an opt-out instead of an opt-in changes privacy preferences. Also, privacy policy questions are often displayed with a "yes"response checked by default. Default answers take advantage of inattention, cognitive, and physical laziness, and the tendency of decision-makers to view the default as the standard of comparison, or as the popularly endorsed, or correct answer [3]. We found that if marketers wanted most people to say "yes" to their privacy policy, all they have to do is make "yes" the response recorded if a consumer takes no action.

Figure 1 shows two variations of a question posed to 134 respondents in an online survey about whether they wanted to be contacted regarding health-care surveys. Both questions used the checkbox format commonly employed by Web sites when asking consumers whether they want to opt-in or opt-out of permission marketing schemes.

Figure 1. Checkbox format questions for participation in health surveys.