Abstract:
The Indian software and services market continues to gain momentum, with offshore outsourcing from the US, Europe and other countries becoming mainstream. As jobs that involve processing of personal data are increasingly outsourced to India, concerns are being raised about the protection of this data. While a large number of studies has been conducted in order to assess people’s attitudes about data privacy and security in the US, Australia, Canada and Europe, little information is available on this topic in India.
The research we present seeks to gain an empiric and exploratory understanding of Indians’ attitudes about data privacy and security. We study these attitudes by analyzing the mental models that are reflected in interviews which we conducted among Indians. We will report on a methodology for extracting, analyzing and comparing mental models from texts and on the knowledge we gained about the perception of data privacy and security among the subjects.

Keywords : Mental Models, Network Text Analysis, Data Privacy, Data Security, India, AutoMap

Direct all correspondence to Jana Diesner, Institute for Software Research International, Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213; e-mail: diesner@cs.cmu.edu. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation IGERT grants 9972762 in CASOS, the CASOS (Center for Computational
Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems) lab at CMU (http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu), and the CyLab at CMU (http://www.cylab.cmu.edu). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the National Science Foundation or the U.S. government. We thank Lorrie Cranor for her support and advice on this research and publication. We thank Elaine Newton and Granger Morgan for creating the questionnaire, Pranjali Kanade for transcribing the interviews, and Dan Woods for his help with this paper.