The Privacy Paradox in the Big Data Era? No Thanks, We Are the E-People: The E-People in the Big Data Era

The objective of this work is to propose a new perspective in understanding the phenomenon of online behaviors, termed the privacy paradox, i.e., worry on preserving personal data and contents, but a little attention to disclose them, and thus introducing the new definition of e-people. The provocative hypothesis of this study regards the internet users who, in the Big Data era, are affected by a common covariation of being e-popular/e-visible, e-narcissist, e-(socially)-accepted, e-remembered. These e-behaviors will be conceptually gathered under the term of Achilles' paradigm. A structured web-questionnaire was submitted to a convenience sample of 198 internet users. First and second-order confirmatory factor analyses together with latent means models concretely supported the existence of the Achilles' paradigm and its impact on the privacy paradox concerns. As a result, the privacy paradox is not an effective paradox anymore: self-disclosing privacy online seems to be a well-accepted behavior.