Privacy Attitudes of Mechanical Turk Workers and the U.S. Public

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing platform widely used to conduct behavioral research, including studies of online privacy and security. We studied how well the privacy attitudes of MTurk workers mirror the privacy attitudes of the larger user population. We report results from an MTurk survey of attitudes about managing one’s personal information online and policy preferences about anonymity. We compare these attitudes with those of a representative U.S. adult sample drawn from a separate survey a few months earlier. MTurk respondents were younger and better educated, and more likely to use social media than the representative US adult sample. Although they reported a similar amount of personal information online, U.S. MTurk workers put a higher value on anonymity and hiding information, were more likely to do so, had more privacy concerns than the larger U.S. public. Indian MTurk workers were much less concerned than American workers about their privacy and more tolerant of government monitoring. Our analyses show that these findings hold even when controlling for age, education, gender, and social media use. Our findings suggest that privacy studies using MTurk need to account for differences between MTurk samples and the general population.