Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionSeptember 14, 2022 |
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PONE-D-22-24992Unpacking Privacy: Willingness to Pay to Protect Personal DataPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Skatova, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. I have received feedback on your work from two expert reviewers. We all see merit in your work, with potential to advance knowledge in a highly relevant field nowadays. However, referee 1 points to the ethical concern that a WTP to protect personal data approach raises, and referee 2 is not convinced about your stability of preferences argument. You must very carefully respond to these two issues if you decide to resubmit your work. Also a shortening of the paper is highly advisable. You must consider this eventual revision a high risk endeavour. Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 16 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: PONE-D-22-24992 “Unpacking Privacy: Willingness to Pay to Protect Personal Data” This paper examines a pertinent socio-economic issue of data privacy in the digital world. The paper is well written. The empirical analysis is carefully done with the analysis of eight different types of data using five different methodologies. The results illustrate that individuals are willing to pay for data privacy and that people value data privacy differently for different types of data. The authors acknowledge the limitations of conducting hypothetical willingness-to-pay (WTP) or willingness-to-accept (WTA) surveys, a limitation that is well-recognized in the vast literature on non-market valuation. I have a major concern about the approach of the paper and its potential implication. Why did the authors decide to analyze the WTP as opposed to WTA? The ethical implication of adopting WTP as opposed to WTA approach in the context of data privacy is serious. Is it ethical to propose a market where individuals have to pay for their data privacy? Prevalent economic inequality across the world would imply that if a market to pay for data privacy emerged, those in lower economic strata would be unable to protect their data due to their inability to pay, even if they highly value data privacy. Therefore, ethical considerations will suggest that since individuals ought to have complete ownership of their data, individuals need to be compensated if their data is used by someone else, especially if the data is used for commercial purposes. By adopting a WTP approach instead of the WTA approach, the property right over the data of the individuals is implicitly awarded to the private firms, and the individuals have to buy their right to protect the data. In an ethical society, it ought to be the opposite, wherein the default right to individual data lies with the individuals, and firms that would like to use the data need to pay the individuals for the data. To move towards a more ethical institutional setup, we need more conversation and policy interventions that push private firms toward ethical practices rather than promoting the idea that individuals have no default right to safeguard their data unless they pay for it. In sum, the potential policy implication of this paper that promotes the idea of making individuals pay for protecting their data is a serious concern from the perspective of socio-economic justice in human society. Unless the authors include an elaborate discussion of the ethical implications of their approach and highlight the potential pitfalls in the abstract, introduction and conclusion, I cannot recommend this paper for publication, especially in a high-impact journal like PLOS ONE whose core objective is to advance research for the benefit of society. A minor correction: The round brackets are misplaced in the formula for α on page 17. The correct specification should be α = 1- (D0/De). Reviewer #2: Conceptually, privacy is clearly a complex notion. Although in the introduction authors explain different properties and elements of privacy, a more structured conceptual framework of what affects/constitutes privacy would be useful. This would more clearly separate the preferences for privacy per se and confounders or consequences of privacy-related preferences, such as the willingness to share data. As it is, the paper offers a wide range of information I am curious as to why the authors question whether individuals can consistently reveal their preference ordering with respect to the importance of protecting different types of their personal dana since they provide ample of evidence from other fields that this is not the case. What would make privacy – a complex and context-dependant notion – different, if anything? The authors conclude that stability in stated preferences for keeping personal data private across a variety of elicitation methods is evidence that privacy preferences are well defined. However, respondents provided valuations of keeping different types of data private which follow a particular order (highest value for keeping bank statement private, lowest for keeping physical activity private). Is that evidence of “stability” of preferences? We do not know which of these goods are more valuable to the market, there is no benchmark, so it is difficult to judge whether the ordering of preference is meaningful (a bigger orange relative to a smaller orange, to use the example the authors are using). The real test would be to measure the value of keeping private e.g., one bank statement vs 10 bank statements, or keeping data private for 1 year vs 10 years. What authors show is that people value the same good in a same order using different methods. There is no within-goods comparisons, only consistent ordering between very different types of goods. For instance, if respondents valued a house, a car and a cat in the same ordering using an open-ended WTP question and a slider, or a bidding game, and we found that they always value a house more than a cat, would that tell us that that the preferences are stable and therefore well-defined? What is meant by “well-defined”? I think a more thorough investigation and a different study design would be needed to make a claim about the “goodness” of preferences. The paper is long, I would suggest shortening the text throughout, using more concise language. Also, information (such as the aim of the paper) should be presented at a single point in the paper to avoid repeating the text but also preventing confusion with respect to the aim of the paper. At times, it seems that this is a purely methodological exploration and at times it seems that the focus is on the valuing personal data. Hence, the paper would benefit from a more focused writing approach. Can the authors present their experimental design in a table format? The text is long and it is not easily followed. Can the authors place some of the tables/results in the appendix, to increase the readability of the paper? Again, this comes back to the point of the paper being too long. ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 1 |
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PONE-D-22-24992R1Unpacking Privacy: Willingness to Pay to Protect Personal DataPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Skatova, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Your manuscript has successfully incorporated most of the reviewers suggestions. Just a few points remain that you have to correct so as the paper to be publishable. Please respond to the points raised by the reviewer and make sure to incorporate the required modifications. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 13 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 1. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No ********** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.
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| Revision 2 |
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Unpacking Privacy: Valuation of Personal Data Protection PONE-D-22-24992R2 Dear Dr. Skatova, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-22-24992R2 Unpacking Privacy: Valuation of Personal Data Protection Dear Dr. Skatova: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Iván Barreda-Tarrazona Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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