Ethical side-effect of dataveillance in advertising: Impact of data collection, trust, privacy concerns and regulatory differences on chilling effects

Technological advancements have resulted in the availability and usage of consumer data for digital advertising. This so-called reality of dataveillance may result in unintended ethical side-effects, such as chilling effects that involve self-regulation of media usage as a response to surveillance practices. The current study utilizes a two-step approach with a cross-national survey (N = 334) and an online experiment (N = 536), to study how different data collection methods for digital advertising (i.e., online profiling, watermarking), regulatory cross-country contexts (i.e., U.S., the Netherlands), and boundary effects (i.e., trust, privacy concerns) result in chilling effects. We found that chilling effects are context-dependent as they are mostly driven by watermarking and are more prevalent in the U.S. than in the Netherlands. These findings show that chilling effects are one of the possible side-effects of digital advertising. Cross-country differences show the importance of the cultural context and regulatory regime for consumer behavior.