"It was a shady HIT"
Shruti Sannon, Dan Cosley · 2018
As online digital labor platforms grow in popularity, research is needed to understand how workers navigate the unique privacy concerns that emerge during their work. We surveyed 82 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers about how they make decisions about revealing personal data while doing tasks. We find that many comply with privacy-invasive information requests for a range of reasons, including benefits outweighing costs, fears of losing access to work, and contributing to scientific research. Several workers also engage in privacy-protective behaviors, motivated by perceptions that the information request is unnecessary or violates policies, as well as concerns about data use and identification. We discuss how our findings can inform policy and design to protect workers' privacy.