Children’s Perceptions of Fairness in a Data Disclosure Context: The Effect of a Reward on the Relationship between Privacy Literacy and Disclosure Behavior

Abstract Children have increasingly become the target of commercial entities that seek their customer data. This study examines how young children deal with these requests and explores how enhancing their privacy literacy is related to real disclosure behavior. Additionally, the paper explores how this relationship is affected when companies provide a reward in exchange for the data and how it is mediated by how fair children think data practices are. An experiment with 496 children (9−13 years old) shows that privacy literacy negatively influences disclosure behavior. However, there is an interaction effect between privacy literacy and reward on perceived fairness, eventually affecting disclosure behavior. More specifically, children who are more literate find data practices to be fairer when a reward is provided, which in turn leads to greater data disclosure. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.