Navigating the Personalization‐Privacy Paradox: A Qualitative Study of Users’ Privacy Concerns and Perceptions of Data Practices of Digital Platform Providers

Digital platform users’ desire for personalization and their privacy concerns about surrendering personal information to digital platform providers (DPPs) are paradoxical yet commonplace. Despite scholarly attempts to explain how users cognitively adapt to this paradox, there is little theorization of how users perceive digital platform practices, which, to date, have been implicitly assumed to be pre‐established. Through a qualitative analysis of data from 10 focus group discussions ( n = 50), the current study identifies three dimensions of users’ awareness of DPPs’ platform practices. First, users’ perceptions of the DPPs can be normative, serving as a moral safety net for gauging potential deviations from ethical standards. Second, users’ systemic awareness reflects their abstract understanding of how DPPs operate, associated with them making broad categorizations and forming vague privacy boundaries around their personal data while disclosing for personalization benefits. Third, the users’ experiential dimension suggests that they interpret feedback from their immediate online environment to decide whether to give greater weight to their own privacy concerns when using it. The nuanced/multi‐dimensional view of how digital platform users cognitively evaluate DPPs may have implications for current theorizations on users’ cognitive adaptation to the personalization‐privacy paradox.