Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0
India, world's largest democracy, has witnessed enormous development in information technology over past few years. It has become a necessity to share personal information for every service, from getting a mobile phone connection to registering for online banking. India being a collectivist society (one of the developing countries part of BRIC), has different expectations of privacy than other developed nations. The concept of privacy in India has not been investigated in detail, and we also lack empirical data with respect to privacy perceptions among Indian citizens. Recent developments in the Indian scenario e.g. privacy bill, UID project signify a need for privacy awareness and understanding in Indian masses. It is also important for policy makers to comprehend sentiments and opinion of masses for structuring effective laws and policies for the citizens of India. Our study focuses on understanding privacy perceptions and expectations of Indian citizens. In the first phase, we conducted interviews among 20 participants and 4 focus group discussions with 31 participants, to collect qualitative data about the privacy perceptions. In the second phase, we developed a survey questionnaire to collect quantitative data. We collected responses (10,427) from various cities in India. We hope the understanding developed through the responses collected during the study, helps decision makers and technology developers in producing customizable solutions and laws for Indian users. Also, it will help us in identifying conflicting nature of users in their expectations and practices on privacy matters. As far as our knowledge goes, this is the largest ever study on privacy perceptions in India, we also believe that, this is the case around the world too.

Cite report as: Kumaraguru, P., and Sachdeva, N. Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0. Tech. rep., PreCog-TR-12-001, PreCog@IIIT-Delhi, 2012. http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/research/privacyindia/. Bibtex


Link to Complete Report: PDF

Contents (with links to individual chapters)

  • Chapter 2. Introduction
    • 2.1 India today
    • 2.2 Cultural status of privacy in India
    • 2.3 Motivation and rationale
    • 2.4 Methodology
    • 2.5 Contributions

  • Chapter 3. Interviews
    • 3.1 Interviews sample
    • 3.2 Interviews methodology
    • 3.3 Interviews conclusions

  • Chapter 4. Focused Group Discussions
    • 4.1 FGD sample
    • 4.2 FGD methodology
    • 4.3 FGD conclusions

  • Chapter 5. Survey
    • 5.1 Survey sample
    • 5.2 Survey methodology
    • 5.2 Survey conclusions

  • Chapter 6. Conclusions

  • Chapter 7. Appendixes


Explore our Data

To know more about what people in India think about privacy explore our data here (limited responses shared for now. More coming soon) .

Flier about the Study


Who is talking about this research?

For any feedback / suggestions, please write to pk[at]iiitd[dot]ac[dot]in.

Relevant publications
Ion, I., Sachdeva, N., Kumaraguru, P., and Capkun, S. Home is safer than the cloud! privacy concerns for consumer cloud storage. In Proceeding of Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) (2011). Author's version

Kumaraguru, P., and Cranor, L. Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness. In Proceedings of the 2005 Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET2005) (2005). Author's version

Kumaraguru, P., Cranor, L. F., and Newton, E. Privacy perceptions in India and the United States: An Mental Model Study. In The 33rd Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC) (2005). Author's version

Core members
Niharika Sachdeva, Ph.D. scholar
Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")

Past members 
Aditi Gupta, Ph.D. scholar
Dr. Mala Bhandari, Research staff 

Sponsors