Online businesses are increasingly relying on targeted advertisements as a revenue stream, which might lead to privacy concerns and hinder product adoption. Therefore, it is crucial for online companies to understand which types of targeted advertisements consumers will accept. In recent years, users have been increasingly targeted by political advertisements, which has caused adverse reactions in media and society. Nonetheless, few studies experimentally investigate user privacy concerns and their role in acceptance decisions in response to targeted political advertisements. To fill this gap, we explore the magnitude of privacy concerns towards targeted political ads compared to “traditional” targeting in the product context. Surprisingly, we find no notable differences in privacy concerns between these data use purposes. In the next step, user preferences over ad types are elicited with the help of a discrete choice experiment in the mobile app adoption context. Our findings suggest that while targeted political advertising is somewhat less desirable than targeted product advertising, the odds of choosing an app are statistically insignificant between two data use purposes. Together, these results contribute to a better understanding of users’ privacy concerns and preferences in the context of targeted political advertising online.

在线企业越来越依赖有针对性的广告作为收入来源，这可能会导致隐私问题并阻碍产品的采用。因此，对于在线公司来说，了解消费者会接受哪些类型的定向广告至关重要。近年来，用户越来越多地成为政治广告的目标，引起了媒体和社会的不良反应。尽管如此，很少有研究通过实验调查用户隐私问题及其在针对有针对性的政治广告的接受决策中的作用。为了填补这一空白，我们探讨了与产品环境中的“传统”定位相比，定向政治广告的隐私问题的严重程度。令人惊讶的是，我们发现这些数据使用目的之间的隐私问题没有显着差异。在下一步中，借助移动应用程序采用环境中的离散选择实验，可以得出用户对广告类型的偏好。我们的研究结果表明，虽然有针对性的政治广告比有针对性的产品广告更不受欢迎，但在两种数据使用目的之间选择应用程序的几率在统计上微不足道。总之，这些结果有助于更好地了解用户在有针对性的在线政治广告背景下的隐私问题和偏好。