隐私政策对用户评价的影响——基于微信隐私政策更新的准自然实验

The Impact of Privacy Policy on Users'Ratings——A Quasi-natural Experiment Based on WeChat Privacy Policy Change

以《微信隐私保护指引》颁布实施设计准自然实验,使用多时间窗口对比检验微信隐私政策更新带来的用户评价变化。首先进行断点回归分析,验证隐私政策更新前后的用户评价变化,然后探究了隐私政策更新在不同隐私偏好用户之间的影响差异,最后通过控制数据观测时段和设计伪测试进行稳健性检验。研究发现:隐私政策更新总体上导致更低的用户评价,但其影响在不同隐私偏好的用户之间有显著差异;低隐私关注者更加在乎政策更新造成的不便,因此降低评价;高隐私关注者更能体验隐私安全带来的好处,因此提高评价;隐私政策更新后,高隐私关注者的评价甚至超过了低隐私关注者。

Based on the promulgation and implementation of the"WeChat Privacy Protection Guidelines",this paper conducts a quasi-natural experiment and use comparisons of multiple time windows to examine the changes in users'ratings by the We-Chat privacy policy change.First,it verifies the changes in users'ratings after the policy change by perform regression discontinuity analyses.And then,it explores the differences on the impacts of the policy change among various categories of users by different privacy preferences perform regression discontinuity analyses to.Finally,it conducts robustness checks for controlling observational data periods and designing a falsification test.Results show that,on average,privacy policy change results in lower ratings,however,there are differences on the impacts among various users.Specifically,while users with low privacy concerns are more concerned the inconvenience for the policy change,so that they decrease their ratings,and users with high privacy concerns are willing to experience the benefits on privacy security,thus they increase their ratings.Furthermore,the ratings of users with high privacy concerns even exceed the users with low privacy concerns after the policy change.