To what extent are members of an online panel willing to share different data types? A conjoint experiment

Recently, the idea of ‘data fusion’, that is, of combining different types of data, became quite popular because of the advances of new technologies. In particular, several studies started investigating the possibility of combining survey data with other data types in order to get a more complete or accurate picture of the reality and/or to reduce survey burden. One key element, then, is the willingness of people to share different types of data, beyond survey answers. In this article, we investigate to what extent members from an opt-in online panel in Spain are willing to share different types of information that have in general not been studied before in the literature: records of their surrounding sound (audiotracking), information from their email inbox (in different ways, sharing the email credentials, using an email plug-in or redirecting emails, partially or totally), sensorial reactions measured by a wearable device (neuroscience) and public information about them available online. We use a choice-based conjoint analysis in order to study the level of willingness depending on the incentives offered in exchange, and we present the level of willingness by gender and age groups. Overall, we find huge differences in the level of willingness across data types. Increasing the incentives, on the contrary, does not improve the willingness so much, even if there is a positive trend. Some differences are observed across gender and age groups but most of them are not statistically significant